Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 17 April 2020 in Excel • Tagged with vba, excel • 4 min read
Excel is the undisputed leader in the spreadsheet world, with over 750 million users worldwide. It is a household name when it comes to analyzing data, so personally I find myself in Excel for most of the work I do. One powerful option that in my experience is underused is …
Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 09 April 2020 in Javascript • Tagged with javascript, data-viz • 2 min read
This post will and simulate how viruses can spread throughout a community and implement a variety of different parameters to see how these affect the simulation. This is following on from last week's post on how to do a bouncing ball simulation with the canvas API https://jackmckew.dev/pelican-and-javascript-bouncing-balls-in-canvas …
Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 02 April 2020 in Javascript • Tagged with javascript, data-viz • 3 min read
Today let's look into building a visualisation of some bouncing balls with Javascript. The inspiration for building this comes from Harry Stevens over at the Washington Post for his amazing piece of data journalism around the coronavirus.
Here is a gif of the current version of my bouncing balls using …
Posted by Jack McKew on Wed 25 March 2020 in Python • Tagged with python • 6 min read
Packaging Python code to easily share code with others!
Building upon a previous post on "How many words have I written in this blog?", let's dive into how to share this code with other on PyPI and integrate into this website with a 'word ticker' which updates whenever a new …
Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 19 March 2020 in Python • Tagged with python • 5 min read
Recursively counting words in markdown within a folder
In the last 55 posts, I've written 34846 words in this blog. In comparison, my engineering thesis for graduating university was 9916 words across 69 pages.
A question had popped into my mind this week, "How many words have I written in …
Posted by Jack McKew on Wed 11 March 2020 in Python • Tagged with python • 6 min read
Python Bytes is a weekly, short & sweet podcast by Michael Kennedy & Brian Okken. After having the podcast recommended numerous times by friends & colleagues, I decided to download every episode thus far on the 14th of September 2019. Over the next 174 days, whenever I was commuting, I'd listen to 171 …
Posted by Jack McKew on Wed 04 March 2020 in Book Reviews • Tagged with bookreview, principles, habits • 5 min read
The courage to be disliked is a book around the work of a 19th century psychologist who determined that happiness lies within the individual and doesn't depend on the past whatsoever. I really enjoyed reading this book, and would recommend it to anyone at all walks & stages of life.
The …
Posted by Jack McKew on Wed 26 February 2020 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation, generative • 40 min read
Visualising gradient descent in 3 dimensions
Building upon our terrain generator from the blog post: https://jackmckew.dev/3d-terrain-in-python.html, today we will implement a demonstration of how gradient descent behaves in 3 dimensions and produce an interactive visualisation similar to the terrain visualisation. Note that my understanding of gradient …
Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 20 February 2020 in Python • Tagged with python • 4 min read
One of the most useful skills in my opinion in all walks of life is the ability to find information & answers. A very useful tool for doing this is the internet & search engines like Google. In my opinion being able to search …
Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 13 February 2020 in Book Reviews • Tagged with bookreview, principles, habits • 3 min read
Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg was one of the most useful books I have read. While it doesn't explicitly step the reader through how to change habits, it thoroughly goes through many examples of where habits have changed other people's lives, case studies if you will. By then being …