Shared today on Twitter

Next track kicking off, hosted by @shermozle from @WAWSydney! Great meetup – you should check it out. #yowData https://t.co/jIpfxyFtLR


Yay! @FCTweedie talking data governance and rectifying the imbalance of cute dog photos to cats. 👏😻 #YOWData https://t.co/1USfjc3qKk


How does a Roman historian gain stable employment and “learn to love the data”? @FCTweedie takes us on her journey. Deserved applause for the work she did for the ACNC. 👏 https://t.co/TgmVkZ10Yl #yowData https://t.co/abaYGFQjhc


@AndrewADavidson The fullness of which waxes and wanes. I always try to pick up new supplies at events. Thankfully the AWS Summit in Sydney recently offered lots of opportunity! The folks at @github gave me heaps. 🙂


Lots of great and much needed discussion of privacy and ethics this year at #YowData. I wonder why? 🤔 #jkiknowwhy @FCTweedie https://t.co/7fQQ2Q4tK4


Build ethics and governance into your project early rather than bolting it in. The ODI Data Ethics Canvas can be very helpful. @FCTweedie #YOWData https://t.co/cLq4hcIW9m https://t.co/lJDl21rHXb


Next up – @rohandhupelia from @Atlassian (in a great shirt!) leading us through a retrospective on building their data lake. #YOWData https://t.co/Ml9QyrctYB


One thing that worked well for @atlassiandev was separating storage from compute – going with cloud native storage rather than HDFS, etc. #YOWData @rohandhupelia https://t.co/kjFvalt3yD


Don’t kill your old platform – hide it. @rohandhupelia steps us through how they migrated 700+ users over to new analytics platform… #YOWData https://t.co/03yzXTb4AU


Great demo of @Atlassian’s self-service portal – Transformation As A Service. (I love when a speaker records a demo and then narrates it! Pro move from @rohandhupelia.) #YOWData https://t.co/xoyBbQykXz


HA! Gus from @carsales loves AI so much, he tried to use it to generate baby names… but ran into the Wife Stare of Death. 😂👶🏻 #YOWData https://t.co/WE7bXOqjh8


Fantastic and entertaining demo from Gus on the @carsales image recognition system! Cyclops definitely beat the audience. #YOWData https://t.co/j1rcDVNvI0


There are less tweets from Gus’s talk just because I’m laughing so much! And also learning heaps about the challenges of identifying cars. (You’re gonna want to watch his video after.) 🚗🚕🚙 #yowData @carsales https://t.co/BE476mNWfv


RT @jpcostales: Funniest slide of #YOWData 2018 so far, and very entertaining conference talk, using AI to generate Japanese 🇯🇵 Russian 🇷🇺…


Kicking off the post lunch session is track host @nookstudios – an Open Data and Open Government enthusiast. 👏 #YOWData https://t.co/OceIpIj1g4


One of @yow_conf’s favourite speakers – @lindamciver from the Australian Data Science Education Institute. “We have a massive problem with data… and coincidentally we have a massive problem in education.” A story of kids, data, and computation. #YOWData https://t.co/fnU3cAtAtK


Data literacy means we can question crappy, misleading graphs – the tools government and bad actors use to manipulate us. The first graph doesn’t tell the whole story! #YOWData @lindamciver https://t.co/5KHr4N2NPe


Hearing a cautionary tale from @lindamciver about a student who hated programming in Scratch but flourished when given the tools to solve real, interesting problems. #YOWData https://t.co/HJeQz8iYg9


We don’t need to work hard to attract folks into computer science who already enjoy it and think they’re good at it. We need to work to attract everybody else! 👏 #YOWData @lindamciver https://t.co/e9ogN0jMYt


It’s so important to teach tech and data literacy to kids, and to make sure they have good experiences with them. That’s why @lindamciver founded the ADSEI. You should check it out and see if you can help! #YOWData https://t.co/qIDggM9ipq https://t.co/X3NjIpD12M


Next up is @sachinabey from https://t.co/p7iYWr6IfN who is going to introduce us to LSTMs and create a (*shudder*) Trump tweet generator. #YOWData https://t.co/Po7ePyX8Lx


No need to apologise for all the code, @sachinabey! This is the right audience for it. (But you’re right – regexp is a black art. 🔮) #YOWData https://t.co/4P71XweTvd


Don’t tell anyone, but “Greatery have in thine!” will be a song on my first album. #YOWData @sachinabey https://t.co/MUybXedtzP


Our next session host is the vibrant @Direwolf82 from Brisbane Data Science! Look him up when you’re up north. #YOWData https://t.co/UTQffLnujG


Grant and James from Integrity Systems (part of Meat & Livestock Australia) talking about how they use interactive data visualisation to protect the Aussie red meat industry. (Apologies to the vegos!) Disease outbreak could be very expensive! 😱 #YOWData https://t.co/6UVkG7jSZl


Many folks Iin the audience have designed graph databases… but no one’s ever created one with only two labels! #YOWData https://t.co/UxKfGnyFPb


Spotted during the last #YOWData tea break… who left this guy on duty at the rego desk?! 😂 @evanderkoogh https://t.co/WPzd1OtwgT


Great takeaways from Grant & Binh! As they say, AgTech is the place to be. If you’re in the space, we’d love to havr you join us at YOW Connected in a few months! (CFP now open!!) #YOWData https://t.co/emdpkvt1Gg https://t.co/YNiiZM0sIJ


TIL that you can use facial identification on cows! 👍🐄 #YOWData https://t.co/ltrGPKgYWk


Aidan from CSIRO is up next – talking about infrastructure as code and hypothesis-driven architecture. (Nice shout out to @boicy!) #YOWData https://t.co/eNTPC3jF1H


RT @unixbigot: Oddly enough, that is not the first time I’ve heard the phrase “cow facial recognition” this week at #YOWData


The opposite of using the scientific method to architect software: “We heard about Lambdas at the AWS Summit, and thought, ‘Why not?’” 😂 @aydun1 #YOWData https://t.co/uSfzpgIUE0


An unsolicited endorsement from @aydun1 for @epsagon, which seems like a great tool for monitoring your serverless deployments! #YOWData https://t.co/Vxk86t3BrL


Great energy as @mantaq10 kicks off our final talk before tea. Another important focus on privacy and security! #YOWData https://t.co/IaB043gJX0


If your only defence against a data breach is a contract, that’s not good enough… especially when the data could be life-endangering to users. @mantaq10 #YOWData https://t.co/zfBQ3v4YFf


Learning about what data augmentation is, and how data sets are combined out in the wild. The implications get scary very fast! #YOWData @mantaq10 https://t.co/NsTbFaFVUH


Ooh, homomorphic encryption. I learned about that at #YOWData 2016 and it BLEW MY MIND. (You can do math and analysis on data that you can’t actually see??? 🤯) #YOWData @mantaq10 https://t.co/QIPMwhli58


From monoliths to microservices and now, I suspect, enterprise data fabric layers. Great job @mantaq10 on building up to this one potential solution to a complicated privacy landscape! #YOWData https://t.co/QegtU0YHON


@lindamciver I have your business card wallet! I’ll take it to the rego desk.


Final session is being introduced by PC chair @delitescere! The committee have done a fantastic job at choosing a great range of talks this year. 👏 #YOWData https://t.co/4Rd7kvOYE7


Up next – @GalaCF from @neighbourlytics, one of the awesome @shestarts companies I met last year! #YOWData @BlueChilliGroup https://t.co/SryJXXThSR


Most of #yowData has been about big lofty concepts, but @GalaCF’s talk is going to be about what she does every day – look at data and try to make sense of it. https://t.co/y3snrdNvS3


Second-to-last talk: Andrew from @Data61news giving us one last deep dive on graph networks! #YOWData https://t.co/FEXbrnmlCN


@unixbigot I suspect @jedws is up for that…


Traditional machine learning assumes every instance is independent – but in reality, the relationships between entities matter. If you know Lenny, Homer, and Carl are colleagues, it’s easier to predict Carl’s income! #YOWData https://t.co/KOZyiancDr


The cold start problem is when your recommendation engine doesn’t work when the user or content is new and has no previous ratings. Hybrid systems with Graph ML get around this! #YOWData https://t.co/w5c6DMqIk8


Last talk of the day – @notsolonecoder and her wonderfully titled “Is the 370 bus the worst in Sydney?” 🚌 #YOWData https://t.co/sV8NzRQDaT


Ooh. Since I saw this talk last, @notsolonecoder has addressed the very topical Sydney bus privatisation issue. Interesting! #yowData https://t.co/IUGI3UU36z


Lots of chucking and groaning as @notsolonecoder explains the complicated data wrangling she had to do to match up real time bus data with timetable info. #YOWData https://t.co/gUfPF1H6hg


RT @JaneCaro: I cannot believe people r blaming women on boards 4 failures of corporate governance! Do people think boards behaving badly o…


@melissa_loh The look on Stoney’s face… 😂


@itsradhika_ Yayyy! It was super fun – hope your laptop looks awesome! 🙂


@MxRozen @notsolonecoder She showed that in her talk. 😉


@mjcavaretta @PinterestEng @arburbank They’ll be up on the YOW website later today!



Important Note

This site features content going all the way back to 2000. The posts you’ll read reflect my views and writing style at the time. While I have gone back to clean up a few of them, I think it’s important not to sanitise too much. This site is a record of who I am and how I’ve grown. Any blog post written years ago may not reflect who I am today, nor how I would write about the same topic today.