Optimising algorithms in Go for machine learning

In my last blog post I walked through the use of machine learning algorithms in Golang to analyse the latent semantic meaning of documents. These algorithms, like many others in data science, rely on linear algebra and vector space analysis. By their nature, they often have to deal with large data sets, so any inefficiencies in the data structures used or algorithms themselves can result in a large impact on overall performance and/or memory usage. »

Semantic analysis of webpages with machine learning in Go

I spend a lot of time reading articles on the internet and started wondering whether I could develop software to automatically discover and recommend articles relevant to my interests. There are various aspects to this problem but I have decided to concentrate first on the core part of the problem: the analysis and classification of the articles. To illustrate the problem, lets consider the following string representing an article for the purpose of this example. »

Using data to identify the impact of Southern Rail industrial action

I, like many others, have been affected by the ongoing industrial dispute over Driver Only Operation (DOO) on Southern Railways. On some days this amounts to delayed or cancelled trains with extended journey times and the inconvenience of standing all the way into London and on others, like today, strikes leave no viable way of getting to work in London at all. There have been many attempts to measure and demonstrate the impact of the industrial action such as the use of the #todayimissed hashtag on Twitter (see below), a recent passenger survey conducted by The Association of British Commuters and even a tongue-in-cheek video game. »

Extending Go programs with plugins

I am really enjoying programming in Google’s Go language (Golang for search engines) but very occasionally come across things that aren’t really possible, or considered idiomatic, in Go. Go is a very opinionated language which is a good thing as it keeps the language and tool chain very simple but also means if you need to do something unusual, it can sometimes feel like you are fighting the language. One example of this is developing plugins. »

Continuous delivery pipeline for blogging with Hugo and Wercker

This is the start of my new blog. It is something I have been meaning to do for a long time but somehow never quite got around to. Part of the problem for me was choosing a blogging platform and tool chain - I was overwhelmed by the number of different options available. I know lots of people use platforms like Wordpress but I always liked the idea of static generators like Jekyll. »