This is a side project I’ve been working on occasionally in my spare time. Facebook Groups are often a wonderful place for finding new music. There’s many niche genre/location specific music groups that are goldmines. I regularly go through the process of opening a music group on Facebook, scrolling through the page and clicking on posts that link to Youtube, Spotify, Soundcloud, Bandcamp and other streaming sites. I give the songs a listen and then if I like it I add it to my Spotify. It would be nice if I could just have all of these songs already in Spotify and just listen to them with no interruption of having to click on the next link.

I wanted to automate the process of getting some information out of a Facebook group. Unfortunately the Facebook Graph API only allows administrators of a group to access that groups posts via the API. So I went down the route of scraping the information instead.

I passed the Solutions Architect Associate exam in January 2020 with a score of 901. I started off learning by using the ACloudGuru course. While it was a decent introduction that was nicely structured, after completion I took practice exams with Jon Bonso and discovered I was woefully underprepared. I would not rely on the ACloudGuru course alone to get you through the exam.

Last April my work sponsored an AI Hackathon in Belfast. We provided a dataset of bot generated and user written reviews and asked them to try and detect the fake reviews. Myself and a coworker ran a workshop to teach folks the basics of text classification and get to a working evaluated solution.

Glastonbury is a notoriously difficult festival to get a ticket to. Last year myself and some friends managed to get some. It was good craic. Such craic that we wanted to go again. I decided to splash a bit of technical knowledge into my attempt this year to see if I could turn the odds in my favour. How could I maximise my chances of getting a ticket?

So I’ve updated my site to use Jekyll Now. It’s a static site generator and it’s all hosted on GitHub pages. The old one was quite slow, it wasn’t very mobile friendly and it required too much mucking about with HTML to add new posts. This lets me write new posts using markdown. Simple is good.

In March 2018 I took part in HackTheHub, a Belfast based hackathon. And I won! In a team of three known as the Deep Ducks we developed an app, Ready Reviews, which processes customer reviews as they are being typed and detects shipping and customer service issues on the spot so that the user can be directed to the correct place to resolve their issue.

I developed a website on the topic of Ethereum to demonstrate my knowledge of HTML, CSS and jQuery for a University module. The website design was based off the Bitcoin site (now a different design it seems). It even has a fun game! Try out the demo.

In July 2017 I took part in Kainos AI Camp. Over two weeks I learned about the theory behind machine learning and how to apply it in software development.

In October 2015, myself and three friends took part in Liberty IT’s 24 hour hackathon. Our aim was to spread awareness for Macmillan through social media. We developed a web app that provides personalised statistics on cancer risk and could easily be shared on social media. We placed second overall. Try out the demo.