NotANumber

Pushing the edge of LLMs and supporting our leadership growth

September 5, 2025

Good grief, I last wrote in January. How the year can fly past when you've got a bunch of fun projects on the go and you're under the press of overload! I...

Increasing success using verified LLM prompt iteration

January 31, 2025

Here I look back at the last 14 months building my RebelAI leadership community and I'll talk on a technique I used in last year's ARC-AGI-1 (AKA ARC AGI...

Happy new year! Overload and winning a race

January 2, 2025

Well - happy new year! The last issue was back in August before I went on my charity car drive (more on that below - we won - again!). Since then overload...

Boosting LLM correctness from 12% to 54% by working on data representation (ARC AGI)

August 30, 2024

Boosting LLM correctness from 12% to 54% by working on data representation (ARC AGI) Further below are 3 jobs including: Python AI Engineer at Qualis Flow...

LLM papers for robustness & the return of the 5-LOWer charity car

August 10, 2024

Curated LLM papers, the return of the 5-LOWer charity car Further below are 6 jobs including: Python AI Engineer at Qualis Flow Ltd Data Scientist at ANNA...

Further leadership notes from PyDataLondon 2024, a new commercial scikit-learn support model

June 26, 2024

Further leadership notes from PyDataLondon 2024, a new commercial scikit-learn support model Further below are 5 jobs including: Data Scientist (FTC - 12...

Leadership advice from PyDataLondon 2024

June 20, 2024

Leadership advice from PyDataLondon 2024 Further below are 6 jobs including: Data Scientist (FTC - 12 Months) Senior Data Scientist Principal Data Scientist...

Successfully dealing with leadership politics, making `apply` in Pandas even faster

June 7, 2024

Successfully dealing with leadership politics, making apply in Pandas even faster Further below are 6 jobs including: Data Scientist (FTC - 12 Months) Senior...

What question should you be asking yourself sooner?

May 31, 2024

What question should you be asking yourself sooner? Further below are 3 jobs including: Data Engineer at Airtime Rewards, Permanent, Manchester, Analytics...

Hiring tips from RebelAI & Fast Pandas advice

May 8, 2024

Hiring tips from RebelAI & Fast Pandas advice Further below are 3 jobs including: Data Engineer at Airtime Rewards, Permanent, Manchester, Analytics Engineer...

Pandas 2 or something else? Predicting on scant data with Metaculus

February 6, 2024

Pandas 2 or something else? Predicting on scant data with Metaculus Further below are 4 jobs including: AI and Cloud Engineers at the Incubator for...

Python's new JIT, value and rogue behaviour in LLMs, on reading a research paper

January 26, 2024

Python's new JIT, value and rogue behaviour in LLMs, on reading a research paper Further below are 4 jobs including: AI and Cloud Engineers at the Incubator...

Experiment with local LLMs with llama.cpp

January 11, 2024

Experiment with local LLMs with llama.cpp Further below are 6 jobs including: AI and Cloud Engineers at the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, UK wide,...

Leadership lessons from my RebelAI leadership community

December 21, 2023

Leadership lessons from my RebelAI leadership community Further below are 7 jobs including: AI and Cloud Engineers at the Incubator for Artificial...

Develop faster with Python 3.12, profile multi-core with VizTracer

November 9, 2023

Develop faster with Python 3.12, multi-process speed profiling, polars-business and sequencing sourdough DNA Further below are 5 jobs including: Data...

Faster development with Polars and a bit of ChatGPT, plus some leadership tips

October 30, 2023

Develop faster in Polars via better error messages and a couple of leadership resources Further below are 5 jobs including: Senior machine learning engineer...

Completing our charity car drive, LLM lies and logic for kids

September 27, 2023

Completing our charity car drive, LLM lies, teaching logic to kids, why commenting on GitHub is a Good Idea Further below are 5 jobs including: Senior Data...

Some more thoughts on Polars and Dask

August 24, 2023

Some more thoughts on Polars and Dask Further below are 7 jobs including: Software Engineer at Qualis Flow Ltd, Scientist/Engineer for Machine Learning...

Reflections on Polars and Pandas 2 & a new Salary Guide

August 4, 2023

Reflections on Polars and Pandas 2 Further below are 7 jobs including: Scientist/Engineer for Machine Learning, Senior Data Scientist at CEFAS, Data...

Lessones learned at the Executives at PyData discussion session from PyDataLondon 2023

July 13, 2023

Lessones learned at the Executives at PyData discussion session from PyDataLondon 2023 Further below are 3 job roles including Senior roles in DS and...

You might want to pay attention to Polars - our first thoughts

May 26, 2023

You might want to pay attention to Polars - our first thoughts Further below are 4 jobs including Lead and Senior Data Science positions at companies like...

New Rebel AI leadership group, PyDataLondon conference and SW Engineering tools for you

May 5, 2023

New Rebel AI leadership group, PyDataLondon conference and SW Engineering tools for you Further below are 5 jobs including Senior/Lead/Head Data Science and...

Observations from last week’s Software Engineering course and a pile of new Open Source tools for you

April 19, 2023

Observations from last week's Software Engineering course and a pile of new Open Source tools for you Further below are 7 jobs including Senior/Lead/Head...

A new book on feature engineering, imminent Pandas 2 and more

March 31, 2023

A new book on feature engineering, imminent Pandas 2 and more Further below are 4 jobs including Senior Data Science positions at companies like Made with...

"Asking good questions about data science projects", ArcticDB, and Pandas in the browser

March 20, 2023

“Asking good questions about data science projects”, ChatGPT hallucinations, ArcticDB, and Pandas in the browser Further below are 7 jobs including...

Notes on Python 3.12, new matplotlib features and some new open source tools

February 17, 2023

Notes on Python 3.12, new matplotlib features and some new open source tools Further below are 7 jobs including Senior and Research Data Science and Data...

Fixing your data science projects, valuation, rubber ducking and new ML tools

February 3, 2023

Tips for fixing Data Science projects from our Global conference, valuation, rubber ducking Further below are 9 jobs including Senior and Research Data...

Faster Pandas, Dask, compilation and dataset annotation improvement

January 18, 2023

Faster Pandas, Dask, compilation and dataset annotation improvement Further below are 7 job roles including Senior roles in DS and DEng and Research at...

Patterns for successful projects and a bumper load of text-fixing OCR tools

December 8, 2022

Patterns for successful projects and a bumper load of text-fixing OCR tools Further below are 6 job roles including Senior roles in DS and DEng at...

Attend PyDataGlobal (virtually) for a feast of informative sessions

November 22, 2022

Further below are 3 job roles including Senior roles in Data Science and Data Engineering at organisations like Causaly and MDSol. Tomorrow at 4-5pm...

Specialist explains why your Python 3.11 run-times are faster

November 10, 2022

Specialist explains why your Python 3.11 run-times are faster Further below are 3 job roles including Senior roles in Data Science and Data Engineering at...

Do you want your Python code to run faster? Good news!

October 31, 2022

Do you want your Python code to run faster? Good news! You’ll soon get easier debugging in sklearn too Further below are 5 job roles including Senior roles...

Learn the scaling secrets of a 1-person ML stock picking engine

October 17, 2022

Learn the scaling secrets of a 1-person ML stock picking engine Further below are 6 job roles including Senior roles in Data Science and Data Engineering at...

Big speed-ups for pure Python code coming soon with Python 3.11

September 28, 2022

Big speed-ups for pure Python code coming soon with Python 3.11 Further below are 5 job roles including Senior and Lead roles in DS and DEng at organisations...

Sourdough by Experiment and the Squirrel Squadron

September 15, 2022

Sourdough by Experiment, Squirrel Squadron Further below are 3 job roles including Senior roles in DS and DEng at organisations - if you’ve got a job to...

How do you build a solid backlog and derisk your novel projects (Part 2)?

August 31, 2022

How do you build a solid backlog and derisk your novel projects (Part 2)? Further below are 7 job roles including Senior, Staff and Lead roles in DS and DEng...

Building a solid backlog and derisking your novel projects

August 18, 2022

How do you build a solid backlog and derisk your novel projects? Further below are 7 job roles including Senior and Staff roles in DS and DEng at...

Talking about derisking, building a backlog and estimating Data Science projects

August 3, 2022

Talking about derisking, building a backlog and estimating Data Science projects and PyDataLondon 2022 Conf videos PyDataLondon2022 happened 6 weeks back (...

Observations from my Team Structure and Growth Call last week

July 21, 2022

Observations from my Team Structure and Growth Call last week I noted last issue that I’d dig further into building data science teams with a Zoom call - the...

How do you Structure your Data Science team?

July 7, 2022

More lessons from the PyData London "Executives at PyData" session on Team Structure In the last issue I summarised the main discussion at the Executives at...

Lessons learned from the Executives at PyData session at PyDataLondon 2022

June 24, 2022

Lessons from the Executives at PyData session at PyDataLondon 2022 We ran our first post-pandemic in-person PyDataLondon conference a week back in central...

Aiming for target-rich environments improves your chance of success

June 9, 2022

PyDataLondon - talks aimed at leaders, our great schedule and volunteering Next week sees the return of our PyDataLondon conference after a 2 year Covid gap....

PyDataLondon returns and some thoughts on Higher Performance Python

May 27, 2022

Thoughts - PyDataLondon meetup and conference Next week we have our first PyDataLondon meetup in a couple of years! It’ll comprise a set of lightning talks...

Two lessons for you to avoid failed data science projects

May 11, 2022

Thoughts Thanks for the good wishes some of you have sent. We're all much better now - sleep deprivation is crap (and nasty infant illness is just awful),...

Memory use diagnosis, Ibis 3, "XGB for all"

April 27, 2022

Thoughts This will be a short issue, my infant has been very ill in recent weeks and I confess that sleep deprivation is catching up. I had some great...

Metrics used whilst “making $1M for my client”, saving power wastage through data, finding effective Covid masks

April 13, 2022

Thoughts - metrics used whilst “making $1M for my client” Below I talk on system profiling before trying to make things faster, Covid masks (maybe you have...

On “making $1M for a client” and speeding-up Dask

March 31, 2022

Thoughts - on “making $1M for a client” and speeding-up Dask Recently with one of my clients we’ve celebrated finding over $1M in recoverable overbilling and...

Learning to estimate, supporting open source creators, upcoming PyData conferences

March 16, 2022

Thoughts Given some of the big events happening in the world I’ve focused more of my time on “estimation”, I’ve made notes on this and the Metaculus site...

Automatically finding interesting data relationships, more thoughts on the Unschedule

March 4, 2022

Thoughts Below I talk on leading vs lagging indicators to track progress, the lux auto-interesting-relationship discovery tool and share Jesper’s thoughts on...

Wasting less time to get more done

February 18, 2022

Thoughts I finished another Successful Data Science Projects course last week, we had some very productive discussions about the whole early-stage through to...