puntofisso

As part of it, I ran the AI Skunkworks & Deployment programme, aiming to trial-and-launch AI-driven services.

While I often joke that joining a healthcare organisation in the midst of a global pandemic was a debatable life choice, that experience gave me a solid exposure to what it actually means to try to adopt AI.

I now help run HM Revenues & Customs' Chief AI Office.

This 4-part blog tries to share some lessons.

Two thoughts:

1) I'm not 100% sure what to do when the ratio can't be complied with because the original photo has a certain shape, but I'm definitely thinking about it; in general, how to get as much as a consistent crop is the main reason for FaceCrop;

2) trying to keep the UX as simple as possible, so I assume (in this MVP) that the user wants to crop pictures at the same size/quality of the original, and do any further edits elsewhere... but it does make sense and it's probably something not that difficult to achieve with a sensible interface (it also reminds me of https://squoosh.app/)

Long story short: I had a bit of a fixation with political data wrangling.

This got me two really odd personal successes (excuse the slightly blowing of my own trumpet here, for story's sake): an app [1] that takes UK Parliament debate transcripts and makes an interactive n-gram analysis, similar to Google Books N-gram viewer, which was used by Robert Peston's political show on national TV and the press in the UK (e.g. on the Financial Times [2] and the Sunday Times [3]); then I did a quasi-viral blog post that used code to calculate the average face of a British MP [4], which got me a few contracts, including one with the BBC for the same thing in the US Congress [5]

When I say sideways, what I mean is that the interesting thing is that the jobs I got when using these as examples were not hands-on data wrangling jobs (in fact, they are terribly dirty pieces of code, but that's another story). What they got me is two things: from a technical perspective, the ability to see an end-to-end process to create a product, the running of a service no matter how small for a decade, the use of cutting-edge technology; from a broader point of view, they were great to show me catching the zeitgeist, seeing stories in data, engaging with national media. Both were incredibly "catchy" stories to tell during an interview, and even when challenged (my recent employers being in the public sector) they allowed me to explain myself and my journey.

So, in summary, I love how these two one-day hacks turned into great interview stories, beyond the very minor direct income that they got me.

Aside from the ability to blow my own trumpet a little, the broader applicable lesson here is that by working on something you have a passion for, no matter how geeky it might be, you can build something simple and not necessarily super tidied up, that will however be a good prompt to discuss both your technical and non-technical skills.

I've coached a few candidates for interviews in the intervening years, especially people in tech roles, and it strikes me how often they play down their own side project, which are sometimes much way technically better than mine and with some pretty good stories around the initial motivation and use examples.

[1] https://parli-n-grams.puntofisso.net/

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/d9db05e7-bb1c-4f38-9a02-bd6b66c9c...

[3] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mps-are-becoming-more-loc...

[4] https://puntofisso.medium.com/i-calculated-the-average-face-...

[5] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171018-this-is-the-face...

But I would do three things (some of which I see mentioned in several post below):

1. download as much as you can – wikipedia, stackexchange (e.g. https://archive.org/download/stackexchange), openstreetmap; possibly, set up a local wifi router to allow others to access these and, if you keep it technical, it might be that this will enable you to get in touch with others with similar needs, which should keep you learning together as much as possible

2. if the conditions allow, try and get your hands on StarLink. Getting a dish and router might be problematic. But if you like diy and assuming you can actually sign up to it, it should be possible to self-build a connection kit using spare parts and an ordinary sat dish.

...which brings me to...

3. consider getting into ham radio. This, once again, depends on the situation in the country, and whether licensing is an option or not. But, providing you can and that you have electricity, this could get you in touch with others, who will usually be techies and may be able to also answer coding questions (although this is a willingly long stretch). And, albeit at very low speed, Internet via ham radio is itself a possibility, e.g. https://spectrum.ieee.org/build-a-longdistance-data-network-...

All the best to you, and I hope the situation improves quickly!

What's really stuck with me is that it seems that anti-fraud legislation in many countries allows PayPal and, most importantly, traditional banks to accuse a customer of fraud and close their account without having to provide the actual reason that triggered the anti-fraud checks.

It's not just Stripe by the way: I had my own issue with PayPal (luckily, not very serious as I only had $8 in the account): https://puntofisso.medium.com/paypal-closed-my-account-with-.... And, famously here in the UK, Richard Davey had the same with a high street bank, HSBC: https://medium.com/@photonstorm/hsbc-is-killing-my-business-....

Most of these incidents are caused by entirely misplaced anti-fraud regulation, which is based on assumptions that come from a different era in which transaction were mostly national, mostly predictable, mostly referring to a set of easy-to-understand products and services.

I wonder if what we need is to advocate for new policies and regulations with our respective national legislators.

I can't trust any reviews after this. The major issue is that the review system is flawed. One odd bad review should not affect the overall standing of a business, so even assuming a review was flawed they should leave it on; if they don't, it means that the whole review framework is wrong somehow because statistically gives power where it shouldn't.

Which makes me wonder – maybe a simple, overlooked way, to start side hustles is to replicate a service, but offer better pricing that works for niche/bootstrapped contributors, as opposed to creating niche versions of the service?

In the remote world, it's going to be difficult to address, but it's happened also in the old physical world — albeit less frequently.

It's fundamentally a pointer to my other social presence and a list of "cool projects" (mostly side gigs) that I've done over the years.

The idea was simple: I signed a contract with OptaSports, providers of real-time data from Rugby World Cup and Six Nations matches, and I created real-time visualization of that data directly in an app. Some of the features were a direct translation of Colm's app from football to rugby (for example, showing the location of kicks became the location of passes, etc), but I also added a way to draw a full animation of a game in real-time.

The app was picked up by The Guardian, the Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, it was used on the ITV Wales blog, and got coverage on Italian TV. Success, eh? But I sold a grand total of 140 apps. Luckily, Opta had been very generous because they want to invest in rugby, so I didn't lose a lot of money. A year later, I decided to try the free app route with ads and without using Opta data, and generated all the updates myself, without the visualization stuff but by simply sending text updates during the games. The app got 15,000 downloads, and thousands of concurrent users. I got slightly more excited, but after 6 weeks of usage I netted £100 in ad revenue.

I stopped and accepted that time required vs benefit achieved wasn't good. All in all, it might have been that PR wasn't really my thing, compounded by the fact that rugby has a smaller fanbase than football. With Opta, we even tried approaching several potential media partners, but we never got anywhere.

However, it was fun.

It got me a few contracts as developer and as trainer on mobile development, and it solidified my credentials as an all-round data expert (I used it in my most recent successful job application), so although it didn't directly made me any money I'm happy about it.

If you're curious of what it looked like, I still maintain its webpage at http://liverugbyapp.puntofisso.net/

So I started sending them out as a curated list of a handful of links per week, alongside a short explanation of why it mattered or a quote.

8 years later, I still sort of remember if I sent something, and I no longer use bookmarks.