One group of friends loves to debate politics, policy and bias. The most common catalyst for this is a tweet. Is this tweet too left? Too right? Does it capture the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Unsurprisingly it’s very, very rare for us to agree, it’s politics after all. And, while fun, there are times we need to conclude a debate but without a mediator that can be hard.

As a recent parent, so many new questions have started occupying all of my thoughts from “where’s the nearest playground” to “is this safe for a toddler”. But most of all I’ve been wondering about the future. What do we as parents have to do now to ensure our children can live out their best futures? Chief among that is determining what are the best schools. There are so many ways to define “the best” school; academic performance, extra-curricular opportunities, teaching methodology, alumni outcomes, and on and on and on.

For avid readers of this blog you’ll remember my quest to find a house and the app built to help out. While building that I stumbled across a few references to an unofficial NBN API that could be used to determine the broadband technology type present (fibre to the home, hybrid fibre, etc) for a given address. I presume a nifty nelly reverse engineered one or some of the nbn check your address sites to figure them out.

Outside of data, a huge passion of mine is music, in particular jazz. In Melbourne we’re fortunate to have quite a few establishments that support live music and offer amazing shows every night of the week. But this raises a problem; who to see? Where to go? What’s on?! Friends and I constantly found ourselves returning to the same venue websites over and over every time we tried to figure out who to see and at the same time the same thought kept popping up; “you know who’s great at doing the same thing over and over again?

In 2020 I decided it was time to fulfil the great Australian dream and buy a house. After not long on the classic property listing portals it became readily apparent that they could not answer the questions I wanted answered. Which homes have proper internet? Can I get to work within 10min? 30min? This led to the only solution a technologist knows; to throw my hands in the air and say “welp, guess I’ll have to build it myself!

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads through 2020 and across the world, I find myself somewhat charmed to see the mathematics studied back in my university days make the news and can’t help but reminisce. As such I decided to dust off the text books and reacquaint myself with modelling an epidemic. What is a compartmental model? The basis for many epidemic models is compartmental modelling. These provide a framework for capturing different states an individual can exist in and the effects of moving between them.