software engineering

Lessons learned building a fish ID web app with fast.ai and Streamlit, in an attempt to reduce my fear of missing out on the latest deep learning developments.

The passage of time makes wizards of us all. Today, any dullard can make bells ring across the ocean by tapping out phone numbers, cause inanimate toys to march by barking an order, or activate remote devices by touching a wireless screen. Thomas Edison couldn’t have managed any of this at his peak—and shortly before his time, such powers would have been considered the unique realm of God. Rob Reid After On Being a data scientist can sometimes feel like a race against software innovations....

Bootstrapping the right way is a talk I gave earlier this year at the YOW! Data conference in Sydney. You can now watch the video of the talk and have a look through the slides. The content of the talk is similar to a post I published on bootstrapping pitfalls, with some additional simulations. The main takeaways shared in the talk are: Don’t compare single-sample confidence intervals by eye Use enough resamples (15K?...

Bootstrap sampling techniques are very appealing, as they don’t require knowing much about statistics and opaque formulas. Instead, all one needs to do is resample the given data many times, and calculate the desired statistics. Therefore, bootstrapping has been promoted as an easy way of modelling uncertainty to hackers who don’t have much statistical knowledge. For example, the main thesis of the excellent Statistics for Hackers talk by Jake VanderPlas is: “If you can write a for-loop, you can do statistics”....

A post I’ve written on applying some software engineering best practices to data science projects: Most data scientists have to write code to analyze data or build products. While coding, data scientists act as software engineers. Adopting best practices from software engineering is key to ensuring the correctness, reproducibility, and maintainability of data science projects. This post describes some of our efforts in the area… Read more on data.blog

Last year, I wrote about the Reef Life Survey (RLS) project and my experience with offline data collection on the Great Barrier Reef. I found that using auto-generated flashcards with an increasing level of difficulty is a good way to memorise marine species. Since publishing that post, I have improved the flashcards and built a tool for exploring the aggregate survey data. Both tools are now publicly available on the RLS website....

Data science can be defined as either the intersection or union of software engineering and statistics. In recent years, the field seems to be gravitating towards the broader unifying definition, where everyone who touches data in some way can call themselves a data scientist. Hence, while many people whose job title is Data Scientist do very useful work, the title itself has become fairly useless as an indication of what the title holder actually does....

Bandcamp Recommender (BCRecommender) is a web application that serves music recommendations from Bandcamp. I recently switched BCRecommender’s data store from MongoDB to Elasticsearch. This has made it possible to offer a richer search experience to users at a similar cost. This post describes the migration process and discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of using Elasticsearch instead of MongoDB. Motivation: Why swap MongoDB for Elasticsearch? I’ve written a few posts in the past on BCRecommender’s design and implementation....

I recently gave a talk about recommender systems at the Data Science Sydney meetup (the slides are available here). This post roughly follows the outline of the talk, expanding on some of the key points in non-slide form (i.e., complete sentences and paragraphs!). The first few sections give a broad overview of the field and the common recommendation paradigms, while the final part is dedicated to debunking five common myths about recommender systems....

Over the past year, I’ve been using Parse‘s free backend-as-a-service and web hosting to serve BCRecommender (music recommendation service) and Price Dingo (now-closed shopping comparison engine). The main lesson: You get what you pay for. Despite some improvements, Parse remains very unreliable, and any time saved by using their APIs and SDKs tends to be offset by having to work around the restrictions of their sandboxed environment. This post details some of the issues I faced and the transition away from the service....