Welcome!
I do kind of a lot of stuff! I've tried to collect it all in one place, for easier bragging.
Essays
I've published a bunch of essays on Medium.
Damn Near Killed Him is about President James Garfield's pretty revolting death. Macho Anti-Patterns is about tech industry culture stuff.
A lot of my essays are about, like, data stuff, since that's what I do for work. I Spoiled Wordle... is about everyone's favourite word puzzle. Burger Wellington Data Analysis is about the analysis I do every year on Wellington's annual burger festival. A Stab in the Dark was the first essay I published, and it's about what a "stab" is. Oh! Bat Milk is about which animal's milk people would rather drink.
Finally, I wrote a really long series about various techniques in machine learning. I've been meaning to rehost that somewhere else since the articles are soft-paywalled, but for now they're still on Medium.
- Spinning Data Into Thought
- Decision Trees and Dinosaurs
- Linear Regression and Lines of Succession
- Knitting and Recommendations
- Movie Maths: How Computers Understand Text
- The Brains in Games: Video Game AI
- Ten Thousand First Dates: Reinforcement Learning Romance
- How Computers See: Image Recognition and Medieval Polearms
- I Fed a Bot Eight Hundred Burgers and This is What it Threw Up
- Bot Ross: Teaching a Computer to Paint
- How Computers Think
Code
I wrote a tutorial about Pandas, a Python library for doing data stuff. I couldn't think of a good name for it so it's just called Pandas Tutorial. Archetypal Dog Names is kind of demonstrating a data analysis thing, but mostly it's an excuse for cute dog stuff. Mutant Flowers is a demonstration of using genetic programming on ASTs. It's as stupid as it sounds.
Front!
Back!
Contact
Maybe you'd like to get in touch about something? Email me at simoncarryer@gmail.com, or try @simoncarryer on Twitter if that's your thing.
Music
I play a bit of banjo. I'm in a cool band called The Bidibids and we are all very good-looking and talented.
Before that I was in a cool band called Barry and the Crumpets and we made an album, A Good Keen Band.
Conferences
Sometimes I do talks at conferences. Usually on, like, tech stuff. Data is a Soft Science is a talk I gave at "Yow! Data 2018" about data science and social anthropology. Doing Stupid Things With ASTs is a talk I gave at PyCon Australia in 2021, about ASTs and genetic programming.
Websites
I make a lot of stupid websites.
- My Neighbour Toutouwai displays data gathered as part of a native bird monitoring project in the reserve by my house.
- Movie Maths adds movies together.
- Birdle is a daily quiz about New Zealand birds.
- Bat Milk is a survey about what animals' milk people would rather drink.
- One Million Dungeons generates random dungeons. for 5e Dungeons and Dragons.
- Deep Dickinson uses deep learning to generate Emily Dickinson poems.
Fan Fiction
I've written some fan-fiction, mostly as a joke? I'm a little embarassed about putting it here because some of it is quite smutty. Anyway, here goes:
- Family Secret is an extremely filthy Harry Potter story. I quite like this one.
- I wrote A Winter for Wolves to annoy someone. It's horny Werewolf!Captain America fic. Don't read it.
- Anne Under the Moon is Anne of Green Gables with werewolves. Not smutty.
Role Playing Games
I like Dungeons and Dragons a fairly normal amount. I made a separate page for that stuff.