Types of Averages (Means)

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 21 August 2020 in Data Science • Tagged with datascience, python • 4 min read

The most common analytical task is to take a bunch of numbers in dataset and summarise it with fewer numbers, preferably a single number. Enter the 'average', sum all the numbers and divide by the count of the numbers. In mathematical terms this is known as the 'arithmetic mean', and …


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Book Review: The Pragmatic Programmer

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 14 August 2020 in Software • Tagged with software, bookreview • 6 min read

The Pragmatic Programmer is heiled as one of the must-reads for all developers and is extremely well known. It is comparable to a hand book full of tips and tricks to develop more robust software, and also introduces lots of concepts throughout that can be used to improve the development …


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Dataclasses vs Attrs vs Pydantic

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 07 August 2020 in Data Science • Tagged with datascience, python • 6 min read

Python 3.7 introduced dataclasses, a handy decorator that can make creating classes so much easier and seamless. This post will go into comparing a regular class, a 'dataclass' and a class using attrs. Dataclasses were based on attrs, which is a python package that also aims to make creating …


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Generators in Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 30 July 2020 in Data Science • Tagged with datascience, python • 4 min read

Generators are a special type of function in python, letting you 'lazy load' data; a function becomes a generator is with the yield statement. Lazy loading is when you access just a portion of a data set that you are interested in (eg, the part you are working with), as …


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Street Suffix Analysis & Colouring with Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 24 July 2020 in Data Science • Tagged with datascience, python • 5 min read

Street Suffix Visualisation with Python

Ever thought about how roads and streets are named where you live? How many are roads versus how many are streets? Is there a specific pattern to it where you live or is it just random? This post is going to go into how to …


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Sentiment Analysis & Text Cleaning in Python with Vader

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 17 July 2020 in Data Science • Tagged with datascience, python • 8 min read

Sentiment Analysis in Python with Vader

Sentiment analysis is the interpretation and classification of emotions (positive, negative and neutral) within text data using text analysis techniques. Essentially just trying to judge the amount of emotion from the written words & determine what type of emotion. This post we'll go into how …


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Profitable Python Podcast - Show Notes

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 10 July 2020 in Software • Tagged with software, datascience • 4 min read

I was recently a guest on the Profitable Python podcast with host Ben McNeill, the episode can be found at: https://anchor.fm/profitablepythonfm/episodes/Pandas-Alive--Jack-McKew-efui92/a-a2idber. This blog post serves as the show notes, if I've missed anything, please drop a comment below!

Projects Mentioned

A project where the …


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Interactive Random Walkers with Javascript

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 03 July 2020 in Javascript • Tagged with javascript, data-viz • 2 min read

Random walks are where randomly-moving objects move around, that's it. The most fascinating part about it is how many seemingly 'patterns' emerge from the random behaviour, and that everyone sees something different in the visualisations. In this post, let's build an interactive random walk visualisation with Javascript. Let's control the …


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How Pandas_Alive was Made

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 26 June 2020 in Python • Tagged with Python • 5 min read

Pandas-Alive is an open source Python package for making animated charts from Pandas dataframes. This project was first inspired by a very specific COVID-19 visualisation, so I set out to make this visualisation a reality.

This visualisation consisted of a bar chart race showing regions, a line chart showing new …


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How to Make GitHub Actions

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 19 June 2020 in CICD • Tagged with cicd • 4 min read

From a recent post on this blog on how to use GitHub Actions to easily integrate CI/CD into your repository, this post will go into how to create your own GitHub Action!

This post was inspired from developing a few GitHub Actions of my own, which I recently released …


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