This weekend we held the fourth iteration of MeasureCamp Sydney. For those who don't recognise the term, MeasureCamp is an unconference. A slightly chaotic affair quite unlike an ordinary conference.
It's free. It's on a Saturday. There's no keynote speakers or vendor pitches. Everything is sorted out on the day.
Once things kick off, people rush to write up sessions they plan to run and get them up on the board. The day flows from there.
This year we had about 180 people through the door, a record for us. Given it's free, we're always a little unsure of the exact numbers to expect which can be nerve wracking but it's great to see such a large group willing to spend a gorgeous sunny Saturday indoors learning from each other and sharing knowledge.
We're able to do this because of an amazing sponsors who chip in the funds to house, clothe and feed all the attendees. Without them we wouldn't be able to do it!
Highlights for me? I really dug Vincey Au's session on building anomaly detection in Python and Corinne Brooker's Introvert's Guide to the Galaxy where she explained how to make the most of both your loud extroverts and your quieter, more thoughtful introverts.
It was a brilliant day and we all learnt heaps. Afterwards we retired to a local pub for food, drink and analytics trivia. Lots of great prizes handed out for some very creative answers and work on the Pop Charts.
And the whole thing wouldn't happen without our amazing organising committee who've put in countless hours of hard work to make it happen. It's the fourth year so we're getting pretty smooth with it these days, but there's still a lot of work finding sponsors and badgering for payment, organising t-shirts, catering, venues, lanyards, volunteers, software, websites, emails. Thanks so much for Rod, Josh, Priscilla, Moe, Jethro, Mike, Calum and Chaoming for all the hard work.
Some more roundups from LinkedIn:
This has become quite topical again with The Guardian and Good Food weighing in on the best biscuits in a standard Arnott's assortment. Of course the moral of that story is to not buy the assortment. You end up with mostly terrible biscuits. Just buy individual packs of Kingstons and Monte Carlos.
However, back in 2016 my other half and I were arguing about biscuit purchases. My point was that if you're eating a biscuit, you're already on the hook for a decent dollop of sugar and fat. My partner kept buying the biscuits that tasted like they'd been made out of pencil shavings. Digestives, those awful fruit pillow things etc. Being a data nerd, I decided to win the argument with data.
I downloaded the Arnott's nutritional information and parsed the table into a spreadsheet, then pulled together a visualisation in Tableau.
As you can see, there's not a huge amount of difference in kilojoule content between the tasty biscuits like Kingstons and Tim Tams and those godawful shredded wheat and fruit pillow things. If you want to avoid fat and sugar, have an apple.
I presented my findings to Web Analytics Wednesday as well.
Result: I won the argument. We now eat decent biscuits. Amazingly, we're still together!
It's been amazing watching the youngest slowly get better at reading, then suddenly become hooked. The last week she's had her nose in books at every opportunity. It feels wrong telling her to put the book down at the dinner table!
This Micro:bit is a small microcontroller designed to teach kids about programming. As well as the CPU, it has a 5x5 LED array for graphics, two buttons, an accelerometer, compass, thermometer, light meter, Bluetooth and a radio interface so that multiple of the boards can talk to each other. There's also 23 pins for different types of IO you can do, including attaching things like sensors, LEDs and speakers for audio. All this for AUD$25 including a battery pack so you can run it disconnected from the computer. Amazing!
Louis and I have been having loads of fun with it. It's really easy to get code onto it. You write programs in the Scratch-influenced visual editor environment and hit the [Download] button to download the program as a .hex file. You plug the Micro:bit in with USB and it shows up as a storage device. Drag the .hex file to the Micro:bit device and it copies the code over, reboots and runs your code. So simple!
Yesterday we made a simple alarm for Louis' bedroom door. It uses the compass to detect when the door has opened and then fires an alarm. It has a disable switch which involves breaking the banana plug connection on the board. The code itself is really simple and the hardest part was calibrating the compass readings to accurately trigger when the door opens.