Open ThoughtsArticles for the technology minded
© 2020 Open thoughts - Articles for the technology minded
Open Thoughts
Stop, Collaborate and Listen - Working from home with Microsoft Teams
Working from home is going to be new for a lot of people. I’m writing this in March 2020, where working from home is the new normal. So we’ll cover some general working remotely tips, and then go on to go through some quick power tips and then a walkthrough of the Microsoft Teams interface in this how to guide to MS Teams. Note, MS teams isn’t part of the Office 365 family package, you’ll have to stump up for the business package to use it.
Rough Guide Leadership
If you’ve been dropped into a position where you have to manage a team, or you have taken a project to the next level and you need to build one. You will need to start thinking like a leader, and it’s those soft skills that will need to be developed. This is the crib sheet I continually review time and time again to check my focus and effectiveness. I break it down into three key areas Getting Things Done, Creating a healthy workplace and Managing up and across.
Can you learn to code on your phone?
Given the limited screen size and options for programming on your phone is it even possible to get a good grounding in a programming language just from a smartphone? The benefits of learning to code have been pushed heavily to people of all ages as an option for upskilling or just becoming more computer literate. There are a lot of options out there, but I’ll just look at a handful and see if they are any good.
Windows, and Docker, and Kubernetes (2020)
In this tutorial, we’re going to cover installing Docker on Windows, enabling Kubernetes, installing helm and testing it all by running a machine learning notebook server. And then we’ll cover a few extras like docker-compose and Visual Studio Code Extensions.
Python for teams
If you’re a beginner or even if you’ve been doing it for years it’s easy to get lazy and just get by, on doing what you know. Churning out code or maintaining a creaking code base is a bit depressing, but relatively easy to do and you can plod along through that for a while. But there comes a time when it feels like you need to up your game. You can feel the technical debt racking up and you think there should be a better way to do this.
Pythonista to Python Pro
You’ve been doing small scripts for a while and you’ve started getting bigger and bigger projects. But you’re getting the fear, the dreaded imposter syndrome. Now to be fair we all get it and we all have to start somewhere. So here are a few tips to get you from somebody who does Python to a Python developer.
Installing Apache Spark on windows? A getting started guide.
We all read these articles about how big data is taking over the world. One of the tools widely used for this large scale data processing is Apache Spark. Apache Spark is a big data analytics agent and is the base framework of a lot of machine learning and data science used across the industry. It’s all well and good doing data analysis projects with your Jupyter Notebook, pyspark and Pandas, but if you want it to scale you need to design it a little differently.
Saving £millions for the NHS with Pandas
There has been an open data initiative in the UK since 2010 when data.gov.uk was created. After 9 years we now have a huge amount of browseable datasets on the website that can be downloaded and used for your own analysis.
One of the larger data sets available on data.gov.uk is the GP Practice prescription data coming in at around 10 million rows of data every month. This is a lot of data for your average spreadsheet to handle, so this is where tools like Pandas comes in. Pandas is a data analysis library for python that can handle many millions of rows of data and run statistical analysis on them to try and extract useful information.