Category Archives: Python

Password Strength Is A Hard Problem

Posted on August 31, 2019 by Gaius

We are all familiar with the classic advice on password strength, a mix of lowercase, uppercase, symbols, numbers, of a certain length. It is trivial to construct a validator for password strength in Python The problem with this is that … Continue reading →

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Forgotten Features

Posted on February 23, 2019 by Gaius

The ancient wizards who defined the ASCII standard knew what they were doing. ASCII for those who have not come across it, is the standard means of encoding mainly textual data as a stream of 7- or 8-bit bytes¹ for … Continue reading →

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Learning a New Language

Posted on February 10, 2019 by Gaius

Generally, every program I write, regardless of what useful thing it actually does, and regardless of what programming language it is written in, has to do certain things, which usually includes Importing a library and calling functions contained within that … Continue reading →

Posted in azure, C++, Cloud, data science, f#, Haskell, Microsoft, Ocaml, Python, R, Random thoughts, Scala | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

ML in the Real World

Posted on December 22, 2018 by Gaius

About a decade ago now, I was doing a lot of what we would now call ML†, using the what is now called data exhaust‡ from the production infrastructure of an exchange, both the OLTP and DW sides. It was … Continue reading →

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Microsoft Professional Program Artificial Intelligence

Posted on August 8, 2018 by Gaius

Building on the momentum† of completing the Data Science track of the Microsoft Professional Program, and inspired by the amazing season 2 of Westworld, I have now also completed the Artificial Intelligence track, Microsoft’s internal AI course just opened to the … Continue reading →

Posted in AI, azure, C++, Cloud, data science, edx, Microsoft, Python, R | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Not-learning is a skill too

Posted on July 29, 2018 by Gaius

To be successful in tech, it’s well known that you must keep your skills up to date. The onus is on each individual to do this, no-one will do it for you, and companies that provide ongoing personal development are … Continue reading →

Posted in C++, data science, Haskell, Ocaml, Python, R | 3 Comments

Microsoft Professional Program Data Science

Posted on May 2, 2018 by Gaius

I’ve finally gotten around to completing the Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science, which I started nearly a year ago. It’s a pretty comprehensive sequence of courses that gives a solid grounding in (and/or revision of!): Probability and Statistics (the … Continue reading →

Posted in azure, Cloud, data science, edx, Microsoft, Python, R | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Clouds

Posted on August 13, 2016 by Gaius

I have been having a play with some cloud stuff recently, as hinted at in my last post, and have put together some nice Python objects wrapping APIs/command-line tools so I can do things like: VBox is just my local … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud, Linux, Postgres, Python, Random thoughts, Virt | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

How To Interview

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Gaius

One of the things I do at my present job is interview candidates for my team, and occasionally other teams too. I estimate I’ve seen ~150 people over the last 5 years. Of those very few that I do say … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Linux, Oracle, Python | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Why

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Gaius

A few thoughts on why I decided to start working on an open source project: I enjoy working in OCaml (functional languages in general, in fact), and need a project to work on that I can take in any direction … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocaml, OCIML, Oracle, Python, Random thoughts | Leave a comment