↓Skip to main content

Writing

These are older posts, mostly about PHP, profiling and public data.

2022


How to profile your PHP applications with Xdebug

·10 mins
Setting up Xdebug’s profile mode in a Dockerised PHP 8.1 environment, triggering it from an HTTP request or the command line, and reading the callgrind files with PHPStorm and KCachegrind.

Ending an Open Source project (Mapael)

·6 mins
Why I stopped maintaining jQuery Mapael, what the download numbers still look like, and what happens to a small Open Source project when its author walks away.

2018


Titanic Kaggle challenge

·12 mins
My first attempt at the Titanic Kaggle challenge in R: exploratory analysis of the passenger data, then logistic regression, QDA and KNN models compared with leave-one-out cross validation.

2017


A memo on what not to do in Open Data

·14 mins
A list of things open data producers should avoid, illustrated with a real dataset: disappearing columns, renamed columns, duplicated years, wrong coordinates and postcodes that are not postcodes.

2016