If you read a about the history of science, you will no doubt be astonished by some of the amazing theories that people used to believe. I recently finished reading The Invention of Science by David Wootton, which documents many of them (and is well worth reading, not just because of this!) For example, did you know that if you put garlic on a magnet, the magnet will stop working? Fortunately, you can recover the magnet by smearing goats blood on it. Giambattista della Porta tested this and concluded that [...]

As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I've been spending some time at the Alan Turing Institute recently working on The Gamma project. The goal is to make data visualizations on the web more transparent. When you see a visualization online, you should be able to see where the data comes from, how it has been transformed and check that it is not misleading, but you should also be able to modify it and visualize other aspects of the data that interest you. I gave a talk about my work as part of a talk series[...]

Tweet Note: see here for the rest of the series.   Having spoken to quite a few people about using AWS Lambda in production, testing and CI/CD are always high up the list of questions, so I’d like to use this post to discuss the approaches that we took at Yubl. Please keep in mind that this

There were a lot of rumors recently about the death of facts and even the death of statistics. I believe the core of the problem is that working with facts is quite tedious and the results are often not particularly exciting. Social media made it extremely easy to share your own opinions in an engaging way, but what we are missing is a similarly easy and engaging way to share facts backed by data. This is, in essence, the motivation for The Gamma project that I've been working on recently. After several[...]

Tweet Note: read the whole series here.   Last time around we looked at Scala’s Case Class in depth and how it compares to F#’s Discriminated Unions. F# also has Active Patterns, which is a very powerful language feature in its own right. Unsurprisingly, Scala also has something similar in the shape of extractors (via the unapply