The Challenge of Hiring Modern Software Engineers I've been conducting numerous interviews recently, hiring software engineers for both my team and other teams within my company. While I've met many wonderful candidates, I've noticed a concerning pattern: many engineers lack the fundamental skills needed for modern software engineering teams. Common Interview Challenges Here are some recurring…
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I had a couple of hours to spare this morning and I thought it would be fun to do something productive. OK, maybe not productive, but something that might make me feel productive. I had seen people on Twitter claiming to build a proof of concept they had within a few hours with the help of ChatGPT, so I decided to test it out for myself. Wondering a little bit about what I could build, I…
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A few weeks with Dagster I have recently been setting up my first ML Ops infrastructure. The space is a bit of a minefield, with so many components including data pipeline tools, feature stores, model registries, model serving tools, data monitoring and more. 🤯 You have to start somewhere and after doing a bit of thinking and planning, I decided starting with a solid data pipeline tool would be a…
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Realtive imports in python I sometimes prioritize delivery speed in my work and may overlook certain concepts that I can work around. One such concept is relative imports in python. I am certainly not the first developer to encounter the following error when executing a random Python script: So here is my attempt to explain to myself what is going on. Difference between a package and a module Let…
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Simply follow the steps below: Decide on a company that you are considering working for. Start a browser in incognito/private mode. Go to the said company's website. View their "Cookie Banner", and select the option that best describes the mess that's their "Cookie Banner": There is a simple "Accept" and/or "Deny/Accept only essential" option. The UI is designed to lead you to tap "Accept all…
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An old classic I didn't use to be a big a reader, and I am definitely not a fast reader, but last year I ended up reading 20 books in 6 months, which is around 10 times more than I have managed in recent years. I remember reading plenty of books as a childm, but reading books as an adult is something I have struggled with, and so I thought I would share my process in the hope that others might…
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Results are all messed up again because of people cutting the course due to cut off time, but here are the 'results':
Google sheet
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I am sure someone has done this already but if not.... Right here we go again. The results are a complete mess this year - I think because of the weather a lot of people cutting out parts of the ride and so on.
Using the last 6 mile speed as a guide - looks like Oliver Richardson won men's (wasn't he supposed to be a ride captain 🙈) and Jenny Corser won the women? 💪💪 Google sheet Francis Jago…
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I mean I really should be doing my Phd, but due to popular demand. See this google sheet.
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Excited to announce that we are developing ‘Oxford Restfulness and Readiness Tracker’, a platform to help optimise student athletes maximise their performance and minimise mental health issues. We have recently been awarded funding from the IT Innovations Challenge
and will be working with the athletes and coaches in OUBC and OUWBC over the next Boat Race season to develop the product. We really…
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I have again sorted the results by time and so on. There is a second tab just for women.
I have put them on a google spreadsheet this year. The top 200 results are listed below. In total 70 people broke the magical 25 mph average speed, although most starva uploads calculated a route that was a mile or two short of 100. I personally struggled on the hills given how much upper body weight and fat I…
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random rowing picture from my time at Univ I had a 5k test on the rowing machines in the gym today. I did one a couple of months back and it went really well. It was a 20s PB, and I just smashed it. Today, was a different story. I had come in with some injuries over the past few weeks and my preparation had been less than ideal. I had a bit of a sore throat that was also playing on my mind, but…
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cricket at Oxford Watching England beat the Australian's in the Ashes (in particular at Trent Bridge this week) is pure joy, pure pleasure. I am just watching the highlights of day 1 at Trent Bridge (SPOILER: with Australia all out for 60 in the first innings), and well, I am just sitting here, grinning. It's a weird game cricket, it can be painful watching it (or listening on TMS), when your team…
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As a programming language, MATLAB is not my favourite. Yes, you can prototype things in it quickly, but when people start building libraries that then others build more libraries on, you end up getting stuck in it. If you are not sucked into it yet, don't. Please. Save yourself. Here are a couple of reasons why it is a poor choice to do any proper development in (and these are simple (or petty…
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Wnt Pathway Experiments I am looking at the Wnt signalling pathway in my research, which is altered in some cancers. Last week, my supervisor gave me two of the latest papers in the field to look at. I haven't read them in detail yet but below are two sentences from the papers: ... we provide the formal demonstration that APC is necessary for β-catenin phosphorylation ... (Lili Wang, 2014) ... our…
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I manage all my emails from my Gmail. I have way too many mail boxes. I have to be able to manage all of these from one inbox, otherwise I will go crazy. More importantly though, I want to be able to have a copy of all my Oxford emails once I leave Oxford. The write up below describes how you can get all your Oxford emails in Gmail and then also reply and manage them from there, without anyone…
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Due to popular demand, here are all the Men and Women results for the Prudential Surrey 100 mile Ride that took place on Sunday August 4th in and around London. There are clearly some mistakes in there (such as Phils and Nigels on the women's list), but they are all directly from the Organisers website. They of course have all the rights to these results. Give a shoutout to me if you do use them…
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I have made my first ever contribution to the Open Source community in the form of a jQuery Plugin! It is a countdown timer, that displays the time remaining to a set target in years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. You can see an example here. This also coincides, unsurprisingly, with my first Github repository. I have over-commented the code, so other beginners find it useful. There…
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