AIOps Maturity Model

Introduction This document outlines an AIOps Maturity Model to help organizations assess and improve their Machine Learning Operations capabilities. It came from my own frustration that there weren’t any models that fit the real experience of end-to-end data science and operations relationships that covered both ‘conventional’ ML, and practically discussing LLM based systems and how completly differently you have to think about them. This was originally published internally around May ‘24 and then presented at NIDC as an ‘Eye Test Model’, and I promised that I’d eventualy publish it; this is it, dusted off and tidied up for public consumption. ...

March 15, 2025 · Andrew Bolster

Pulling Election Count data out of Google Sheets for fun and democracy

Messing around with Elections NI data Sources: Live Data (for 2023) 2022 Assembly Elections Creating your own Google Sheet and referencing the crowdsourced data The above linked spreadsheets are naturally not editable by everyone; this is great for reliable data but isn’t so great when you want to make pretty graphs. Google Sheets supports the live referencing of external sheets in your own sheets, so you can ‘import’ the data from the read-only sheets as they evolve over the count, and then reference those data in your own visualisations. ...

May 18, 2023 · Andrew Bolster

Wrangling NI House Price Index Data

Data Wrangling NI House Price Index Data This is a ‘messy’ ‘blog post’ that’s just a braindump of a notebook to step through NI House Price Index datasets I was playing around with. It’s mostly code, so if you were here from some ‘insight’, feck aff. There is no analysis here, this is just data wrangling. TLDR As always, Government Open Data has over the years gone from ’non-existent’ to ‘garbeled’ to ‘inconsistent’ and I feel is now in the stage of ‘consistently inconsistent’, which is progress in my eyes. ...

March 27, 2022 · Andrew Bolster

Generative Adversarial Procrastination

TL:DR “Don’t worry about being a procrastinator, just make sure that your procrastinations are worthwhile.” There’s an implicit irony in this post that I’ve been thinking / talking about writing it for at least 6 months, and it finally came down to a tweet to force me to do it. Fun fact, in the time it took for me to write this procrastination post, the twitter poll changed, so I guess I gotta delete it all and play Satisfactory now? ...

November 26, 2021 · Andrew Bolster

Apache Arrow in 5-10 Mins

The below was presented as part of the Belfast Linux Users Groups’ May Technical Meetup. I’m also maintaining this ‘short’ as part of my gradually accumulating ‘python_data_workshop’, so that may be the best place to see updates if you’re reading this any later than 2021. Conditions Theme: ‘Universal Screwdrivers’ Event: BLUG Time: ‘5-10mins’ (take the 10) Slides Transcript Evening folks, and I’m happy to be appearing in what we hope is the last virtual BLUG! We’ve all spent a long time toiling in our own little worlds in relative isolation over the course of this sequence of lockdowns, and its appropriate that now as we begin coming back together, that we’re talking about projects that operate and complement across ecosystems. ...

June 1, 2021 · Andrew Bolster

Dr StrangeBot: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust Machine Learning

This post was originally published as part of my role at WhiteHat Security Links have been added for context/comedy/my own entertainment, but no content has been modified Beneath the cynicism, hyperbole, market–making and FUD; the strategic importance of AI in Cybersecurity is only constrained by us ‘meatbags’. Being a data science practitioner in the cybersecurity space has been a double–edged sword for several years. On the one hand, with the proliferation of automated security testing, network IDS advances, the sheer growth in traffic and the threat surface of our increasingly complex, interconnected application development practices, these roiling oceans of flotsam and datum are everything our data hungry little hearts desire. Related innovations in data engineering in the past decade mean that questions that had previously only lived in the craven dreams of executive officers and deranged analysts are now the kind of tasks that we hand off to interns to make sure they have correctly set up their workstations. ...

March 24, 2021 · Andrew Bolster

A Stranger in a Strange Land: Data Science Onboarding In Practice

This talk was originally prepared for the 2020 Northern Ireland Developers Conference, held in lockdown and pre-recorded in the McKee Room in Farset Labs Intro Data Science is the current hotness. While those of us in these virtual rooms may make fun of the likes of Dominic Cummings for extolling a ‘Data Driven Approach’ to policy, the reality is that Data Science as a buzzword bingo term has survived and indeed thrived in a climate where ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is increasingly derided as being something that’s written more in PowerPoint than Python, ‘Machine Learning’ still gives people images of liquid metal exoskeletons crushing powdery puny human skulls, and those in management with long memories remember what kind of mess “Quantitative Analysis” got us into not too long ago… ...

October 20, 2020 · Andrew Bolster

Tell me about your Programmer - Robopsychologist and other careers that don't exist (yet)

This talk was originally prepared for NI Raspberry Jam’s Kids Track, associated with the full Northern Ireland Developers Conference, held in lockdown and pre-recorded in the McKee Room in Farset Labs In Issac Asimov’s stories, the technical, social and personal impacts of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence are explored. One creation in his books was the career of “Robopsychologist”, a combination of mathematician, programmer, and psychologist, that diagnosed and treated misbehaving AI. In this talk we’ll discuss how on earth you can prepare for careers in Robopsychology and other careers that don’t exist (yet). ...

October 19, 2020 · Andrew Bolster

Back to reality

Realised it’d been a while, thought it was time for an update. I’m gonna try and make an effort to get closer to an ideal of something like #weeknotes as I’ve always been jealous of Adrian’s ability to put this thoughts down and get them out the door in a sensible way… Anyway, use the Table of Contents above to skip to bits you may care about. Farset Updates So, this was the actual reason for this update but it started a weird thought process that led to this blog. ...

September 8, 2020 · Andrew Bolster

Pragmatic Data Science; When Unstoppable Math meets Immovable Ethics

This is a Rough Transcript from The Virtual Bash on Ethics Introduction Around two thousand, two hundred and 20 years ago, Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world”. Archimedes has come to be (rightly) associated with many fundamental innovations in mathematics and engineering, and while I’m sure we’re all sick and tired of screws and levers and jumping out of bathtubs, I’d like to start off with a discussion on one of his more mundane creations, the compound pulley. ...

May 22, 2020 · Andrew Bolster