Mark Douthwaite

A Brief Introduction to Serverless Computing

This post introduces the concepts behind 'serverless computing' -- a way of quickly and easily deploying lightweight apps (e.g. APIs). It looks at the associated advantages and disadvantages of serverless, and gives a short example showing how to deploy your own serverless function to Google Cloud.

Introducing Xanthus

This post introduces Xanthus - a new open source Deep Learning package built on TensorFlow 2.0 for quickly and easily building state of the art recommendation models in Python.

Literature

The Freedom of the Press

It's easy to feel that the present times are 'unprecedented'. Yet sometimes it's clear that the events of today are echoes of problems familiar to those in the past. This post shares an essay written by Orwell in 1945, that feels particularly relevant to the times.

Engineering Skills for Data Scientists

Fire: Simple CLIs done right

Creating CLIs can help improve accessibility and reuse of your scripts and packages, but they can also be a bit of a pain to set up and maintain. Fire makes building CLIs for your latest ML pipeline a breeze.

Personal

Books of 2019

Here's my annual list of my favourite books from the past year. There's even a business book on here for the first time.

Programming

Cython: Lightspeed Python

Python is a wonderful language for many applications, but it is not renowned for its speed. This post looks at how you can quickly and easily use Cython to dramatically accelerate your Python code (in some cases).

Computer Science

What is Reservoir Computing?

What if there was a framework that could be used to exploit the properties of matter for computation? Originally posted on The Conversation.

Personal

Books of 2018

A rundown of my 5 favourite books from 2018, plus a few honourable mentions for good measure.

Data Science

Tracking Monster Jobs with TQDM

TQDM is a tiny Python package that lets you add customisable progress bars to your code. Ideal for some those nasty multi-hour model training jobs.

Personal

Self Important Rant About Books

Because sometimes you need to rant. About reading. And books. And generally disposable media.

Artificial Intelligence

The Side Effects of Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles are starting to pop up all over the place, even in Milton Keynes. But what does this mean for the rest of us? Originally posted on The Conversation.

Technology

Graphene: The Key to Next-Gen Batteries?

Graphene has had a fair bit of buzz in the last decade. One major possible use case is to improve significantly battery tech. This article looks at how. Originally posted on The Conversation.

Technology

British Airways and Our Reliance on Technology

Software has eaten the world. For some of us that may be a good thing. For others, less so. Take British Airways, for example. Originally posted on The Conversation.