Insights for Action

Conflicts between Agile and Data Modelling

Tuesday, 24 Nov, 2020 By Paul Hewson.

Data Modelling Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels

Having worked in various Agile and Waterfall environments I have become fascinated by the potential mismatch between Data Modelling and Agile. Searching for some discussion pieces on this, I found an interesting post that reviews a conference discussion. Ultimately, this dates from Enterprise Data World 2015, but does seem to draw on a lot of expertise from enterprise level people who have had to reconcile Data Modelling and Agile. …

Configuration management

Thursday, 3 Sep, 2020 By Paul Hewson.

One thing I have learnt is configuration management. It’s an under-rated aspect of reproducible research. I was quickly experimenting with an R package, but needed to install the sf package on my tinkering machine. That in turn required another R package units. And in turn, units needed some header files, as did sf. As it turns out, units package failed with a very nice error message telling me exactly what I had to do. And I had very had deja vu dealing with …

Static Websites with Hugo and R-Blogdown

Tuesday, 18 Aug, 2020 By Paul Hewson.

The current iteration of this website is a static website based on Hugo. In my opinion, there is a lot to like about static websites. I have previously used Jekyll and once upon a time coded html manually. However, modern static website generators allow a wonderful presentation. The currently styling is based upon the Terrassa theme; for me it scored highly for accessibility and mobile friendliness. The bigger issue for me though is to do data and version controlling. With …

The right tech for the job

Saturday, 18 Jul, 2020 By Paul Hewson.

A small trebuchet in action

This Trebuchet is a bit puny compared to the one at Warwick Castle. But it’s a fascinating piece of engineering, and certainly makes a bit of a difference from doing bisections with a compass. Here’s why I selected this as “the right tech” to use in school outreach work.

This is old work now, but I learnt a lot getting involved in it. We seem to have designed a school curriculum with the sole intended outcome of …