Robin's Blog

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Travel times, over time

A fun analysis I did a while back was using the Google Maps API to look at travel times between certain locations over time. I originally got interested in this because I found that travelling from my house to the university (yes, that’s how long ago this started…) seemed to either take a very short […]

Pint + SQLAlchemy = Unit consistency and enforcement in your database

Last week I presented a poster at PyData Global 2020, about linking the pint and SQLAlchemy libraries together to provide robust handling of units with databases in Python. The poster is shown below: click to enlarge so you can read the text: The example code is available on Github and is well-commented to make it […]

A Python sqlite3 context manager gotcha

I’ve neglected this blog for a while – partly due to the chaos of 2020 (which is not great), and partly due to being busy with work (which is good!). Anyway, I’m starting to pick it up again, and I thought I’d start with something that caught me out the other day. So, let’s start […]

Favourite books I read in 2019

I made a concerted effort to read more in 2019 – and I succeeded, reading a total of 42 books over the year (and this doesn’t even include the many books I read to my toddler). I’ve chosen a selection of my favourites from the year to highlight in this blog post in the hope […]

Talks I’m giving this year

As I’ve mentioned before, I give talks on a range of topics to various different audiences, including local science groups, school students and at programming conferences. I’ve already got a number of talks in the calendar for this year, as detailed below. I’ll try and keep this post up-to-date as I agree to do more […]

Automatically downloading nursery photos from ParentZone using Selenium

My son goes to a nursery part-time, and the nursery uses a system called ParentZone from Connect Childcare to send information between us (his parents) and nursery. Primarily, this is used to send us updates on the boring details of the day (what he’s had to eat, nappy changes and so on), and to send […]