Who am I?

Hello and welcome! My name's Charlie, and this site is primarily a place for me to write up the things I've been working on, and to test out different things that require a permanently online site so my code can run while my computer's off.

I had a fairly unusual route into coding, and I do strategy and analytics rather than pure software engineering, so a lot of my coding is on the data science side. I spent seven months on projects in Saudi Arabia working with some fantastically intelligent colleagues from Singapore who introduced me to the wonderful world of R, and came back with both a passion for coding and an appreciation of its potential in areas of business it isn't traditionally deployed.

Since then I've moved to the US to focus fully on workforce strategy and people analytics, and on the side have been learning a wide range of things - from web scraping, to network analysis, to using machine learning to help my fantasy football team.

What is this website?

This website started off as a way for me to host certain scripts and try embedding Shiny web-apps in normal web pages. I then realised it would be a good way to force myself to actually write up what I'd been working on in my spare time, rather than just finishing each thing and moving onto the next. So as well as doing some fun things invisibly on the back end, it also acts as a record of some of the projects I do for fun.

It's written in python, using a flask framework, and is hosted on AWS. It currently has a database sitting behind it (also on AWS) that holds the content of blog posts (allowing me to post without opening up the back end), logins, embedded applications and more. It's very much a work in progress, and I'm hoping to continue evolving it over time.

If you want to read more about the website itself, I've written a post for exactly that which you can check out here.