A fun video we took recently for a work team building exercise to show everyone how to make Crispy Skin Salmon in ten minutes at home.

In this article I discuss why I’m excited with ChatGPT, it’s relevance to my career and strengths, and my belief that this technology will be disruptive and in high demand.

Often when guests visit us in the US we are asked about tipping culture. For those not accustomed to it, the ‘rules’ can be considered arcane and arbitrary. While I’m sure my approach will not be without contention, it has served me well to feel comfortable and reflect good service.

The following is a list of some of our favorite restaurants in NYC.

It seems everyone has a story of being stung by an airline booking gone bad. In the age of travel aggregators and easier access to self-booking, I recommend the following rules to ensure you're not caught out.

Understanding of product analytics, metrics and A/B tests is a critical skill for data science consultants. While I have had some experience with these through former projects, it is a skill I am actively researching and studying to prepare for future engagements.

I have put together a list of data science projects I have worked on and their business impacts. This helps to highlight the depth and breath of my consulting experience. It may also be a useful supplement to my resume and for discussions.

Before moving into data science consulting, I started my career in marketing. After university I was in advertising for a year, then moving into the market research industry for a further eight years. Looking back on the experience, I learnt a lot about consulting, marketing and market research techniques. I had the opportunity to leverage my data science and market research experience for a client while at Boston Consulting Group, and I hope to leverage these skills again in the future. As I progress in my career into new and exciting areas, I decided to write up a review of my experience. This could be a useful reference when working with clients in the future, or to go into further detail alongside my resume.

Since beginning of COVID I have spent considerable time learning about better practices for python codebase development.

Several months into the pandemic, we decided to not renew our lease, and find a silver lining by moving out west. Many days couped up in a studio apartment we dreamed of green hikes and snow. We moved to Portland for a 10 week period, but ended up coming back for another 10 weeks after Colorado, and ended our west coast adventure in Portland after a road trip to California - so 5 months in total.

As I work through development upgrades for the wow_auctions repository, I thought it would be a good idea to quickly reflect on the development status. This will discuss the shape of the project after the first sprint of development, the initial upgrade stage, and plans for the future.

I have always been a keen video game player. Since moving to a new country, and especially during COVID times, video games have become a choice way to spend free time. I enjoy complex games with a lot of opportunity to analyse and optimise - no great surprise that I made a career of these skills!

Heading into the second half of 2020, one of my professional goals is to improve my software development expertise. I want to implement best practices in my projects and continue learning about new approaches.

Well, seems my last blog about thing I'd like to do in NYC has been blown to bits by COVID. While in lockdown, I've been going through my reading list and curating some good content that I have come across over the years.

Bri and I have been living in the states six months now, and we are excited to have family and friends come visit in 2020. We’ve been growing a personal list of things we like doing or want to do while living in NYC. If you're planning on a visit, let us know if you like the look of any of these!

It’s fair to say that the first half of the year was a lot of fun. While not a problem according to BMI, I was starting to feel a little bit overweight. Over the years I have crept up to 94kg, since being around 82kg at 18 years old. I had developed some habits over the years such as having pizza after basketball and poor diet while studying for exams.

I started work at BCG in July this year, and was eager to do my job well and settle in. Starting with a top consulting company can be an exciting, anxious and stressful time. On top of assimilating a new company culture, I was also experiencing a new city and culture. To perform well, you need to have a clear understanding of the expectations on you. In particular with consulting, we land in new environments and need to get up to speed fast. After six months in, I have a firmer grasp on the expectations and how to succeed at the job. I wanted to write up a reflection on this starting period and provide some advice for others. I want to provide some practical tips on getting orientated at the company and getting up to speed on cases.

I finished the OMSCS program in May 2019. While the stress has faded, yet the memories are fresh, I wanted to take the time to write up some notes about the program that I hope others find useful. The main focus for the article will be on synergies between the classes. I’ll also talk more generally about what is good and bad about each class.

A long time ago I heard about 'six degrees of separation', and the topic recently came up in a BCG training lecture. We were shown the 'Oracle of Bacon' site which shows actor's relationship to Kevin Bacon. I was curious what was the maximum relationship level, so I got to coding. I found this especially interesting as I have recently completed an algorithms course and this looked like a great use case for testing out a breadth-first-search algorithm. I had recently completed another toy project that needed some graphing algorithms so I saw this as a great chance to practice further.

It’s been almost two months since Bri and I tied the knot. We’re on our final days of holiday and honeymoon at the moment as we prepare to enter the United States for work. While the experience is still fresh in my head I wanted to write an article about our wedding experience. Planning a wedding is a stressful experience, and I made lots of use of online lists and guides. This article is intended to be a guide to having a cheap or modest wedding in Melbourne, Australia. Most of the content will be relevant for anyone wanting to plan your own wedding day, but I’ll also discuss a bit more about the paperwork process in Melbourne, Australia for getting married. In a seperate post I’ll add our wedding day video and talk more personally about mine and my wife’s experience on the day. This article is more intended to be a practical guide to the planning and costs of the day.

If you’ve found yourself here, we may have had a discussion about an upcoming family holiday of yours to Australia, and you wanted to know how best to organise a trip to stay for a week. I have lived in Melbourne, Australia pretty much my whole life up until a few years ago. I have visited a few places but have generally preferred to travel overseas. I always figured I would leave the in-depth touring until later in life when travelling with kids. That being said, I discussed this topic with family and came up with some great suggestions of how to spend a week in Australia. This is particularly relevant to people coming here for two weekends worth of time.

My partner and I spent 6 weeks in Porto, Portugal in late 2018. During that time we were working remote, usually in the morning and late evenings, leaving us most of the day, evenings and weekend to explore Porto. We arrived in the colder, rainier month of November, and didn’t end up venturing outside the city at all. Along the way we found some great places to eat, have a drink and various things to do. The following is a list of what we found to be good.

Hobart has been a destination for some great weekend trips over the years. Very accessible from Melbourne, and with low cost airlines making it easy and cheap to visit, it’s likely a destination we’ll continue to visit every so often. I’ve been wanting to jot down some notes on ideas for people taking holidays there, so this article will list some top picks.

Updated in mid-July 2020. This article is the looks to summarise the learnings from a semester studying Machine Learning. I reflect on the course, discuss the three branches of machine learning, and kick off with an example. We look at a 'decision tree' model on customer satisfaction data, and touch on the fundamental topic of overfitting and underfitting.

My partner Bri and I spent two months in Split as part of our six month trip in Europe. Although we spent most of that time working, studying or at the beach, we had a lot of fun in and around Split. Split boasts a historic castle old town, a great park for walks and cycling, a long coastline of pebble beaches, and small but growing communities of interest (tech, startup, expat, sport and coffee). Outside of Split the best way to enjoy Croatia is on a boat, either the common ferries to islands or Dubrovnik, or small boats for day trips to famous spots, or whole week cruises.

One of my top recommendations for anyone visiting Japan is to visit Koyasan. Koyasan is high in the mountains of the Wakayama prefecture. It is a historically relevant village, considered the centre of Shingon Buddism in Japan. It is here that you can experience a temple stay (Shukubo), many of which include vegetarian haite cuisine and onsen. Guests are welcome to attend early morning meditations. The town and its surrounds are perfect for walks, with the long graveyards nested in forests, large gates, and pilgrimage trails with great views.

A fun video we took to capture the key parts of our six months working and studing remote in Europe.

Over the past year, we have been developing survey chatbots as part of our Human Listening platform. We have noted the successes of this technology in many marketing applications, and feel there is great potential for this technology to fundamentally change how a lot of research is conducted.

We can't help but try to predict the future, especially when it comes to the application of new technologies. Who knew before the fact how radically our lives would transform due to the internet, computers, electricity and the industrial revolution? It seems the most recent development is the rise of AI and machine learning. Will this lead to a future like in Terminator and WALL-E, or something benign? We read about impressive advances such as game grandmasters beaten by AI, self-driving cars and using Alexa in the home. Naturally one might ask when we will have an AI that can beat chess grandmasters AND cook my pancakes? Most AI technology is quite specialised, and what we're referring to here is also known as 'General AI'. Unfortunately, this seems to be a long way off, but we can achieve a lot with focused effort in a single domain.

I've been wanting to put together my packing list for digital nomad life for some time. For a few reasons really, one is for my own purposes as a checklist to see if I have everything when I'm packing. Another is to have a reference link for anyone who sees and likes an item and wants more information or to buy it. I'm also a habitual list-writer, so this list may come in handy if I were to lose my luggage and needed to start over or file insurance.

Everyone has experienced frustration while using computers. You have an important task to do and it can feel like the computer is getting in the way of allowing you to get it done. Sometimes it can be so bad that we experience a computer crash, data loss, or some other problem where we can't recover and don't know what to do to resolve it. After experiencing enough of these problems some people may give up on technology all together and claim that they're not 'computer people'. This is completely understandable and not the users fault.

I'm 8 classes in, and my couple of tidbits of advice specifically for Georgia Tech would be the following 5 tips.

Weighting is an important - but often misunderstood - technique used to ensure research data is representative of a total population. We developed a vlog to explain the basics of weighting.

A sneaky peak inside the suitcase of a digital nomad traveler. I work remote and like to stay agile for long periods of time, so I try to maintain 'carry-on' sizing for travel gear. Accompaniment to the article I wrote.

In market research, segmentation projects are some of the most rewarding projects. I can particularly remember one such project involving a workshop with more than 50 client staff to present a new segmentation. We had tables littered with props, butcher's paper and markers. The workshop was a great engagement exercise. It enabled connection to the research and formation of their own ideas about the segmentation. I have seen some projects follow segmentation analysis with focus groups. It is amazing to see a room full of 'segment A' and immediately see the contrasts to 'segment B' in the next group.

While baby boomers have their francophiles, more recent Australians have grown up with a different experience. Like many others, I was offered Japanese language and culture classes starting as early as grade 5. A fair chunk of my teenage years were spent with Nintendos, various anime and sushi. My first chance to visit Japan came in 2007 where I got my first big dose of culture shock. Since then I’ve holidayed twice more, once with family and once solo. The itch was never fully scratched, and I knew I wanted to try living there one day.

Because i'm looking to travel a lot over the next few years, I've been making special efforts to organise my stuff. For a very long time, digitising photos has been an item on the to do list. It took a whole afternoon, but I managed to digitise all of my physical photos from before the age of 21 or so. That task seems easy compared to sorting out digital media! I have come across so many directories of photos, and copies all over my computers.

Business decision makers often rely on driver analysis to assess what is REALLY important to their customers. For example, customers often claim that price is the most important thing to them when asked. More often than not, however, driver analysis reveals service or other experiences are actually what drives overall satisfaction. This type of insight is what makes driver analysis able to sort the 'signal from the noise'. It means decision makers can more effectively allocate resources in a way that will yield the best return on limited resources to invest.

We've compiled a list of occassions where our analysis tools have behaved unexpectedly. Avoid the blood, sweat, tears and swearing by learning from our experience. We mainly look at Excel, but many of the problems turn out to be deep rooted in computer science and the way our machines handle and process data.

Market research analysts are a specialised role within marketing. Whereas we're all concerned with marketing and business problems, analysts contribute deep domain knowledge of data, analysis techniques, and problem solving ability.

Working remote is a paradigm that fundamentally changes the social and physical nature of work. In many ways it is an evolution like open office environments and hot desking. While there are some clear benefits to employers and employees, there remains some potential difficulties collaborating effectively with remote working employees. This blog post will examine some of these difficulties and suggest strategies for employees, employers and colleagues to get the most out of the experience.

While performing some github repository cleaning in May 2020, I found a collection of blogs from my first blog site which I didn't stick with. This article explores ML classification of text data.

While performing some github repository cleaning in May 2020, I found a collection of blogs from my first blog site which I didn't stick with. This article further explores ML classification of text data.

While performing some github repository cleaning in May 2020, I found a collection of blogs from my first blog site which I didn't stick with. This article is a reflection on taking a big data with apache spark course.

While performing some github repository cleaning in May 2020, I found a collection of blogs from my first blog site which I didn't stick with. This article is a list of references and tidbits I found useful early on.

While performing some github repository cleaning in May 2020, I found a collection of blogs from my first blog site which I didn't stick with. This article links to a presentation on automation - benefits and reasons not to.