ONS Newport Coffee & Coding
A public repository to hold resources and notes from ONS Coffee & Coding sessions in Newport. GitHub repository idea and layout lovingly sourced from Department for Transport (DfT)'s repo. Interested in what other Government Departments have coffee and coding? Check out the Government RAP website.
If you are interested in attending the London ONS Coffee and Coding please check their Github repo for more information: https://github.com/datasciencecampus/coffee-and-coding-LDN.
Get in touch at: [email protected], we welcome suggestions and ideas for future events.
Our Next Event
Our next event will be Coffee and Coding: Turning spreadsheets into interactive web-tools. This will take place on Thursday 24 June 2021 at 13:00-14:00.
Turning spreadsheets into interactive web-tools
The GSS Interactive Tools are a published series of web-based tools built to improve the accessibility of official statistics and is a crucial aspect of ONS’ work in improving the coherence of official statistics from across the UK.
In this presentation, I’ll talk about how using spreadsheets for content and web-languages for templates, Python can rapidly produce web-ready products in seconds. I’ll also highlight how taking a flexible approach in designing the pipeline has paid dividends long-term by allowed the tools to grow to cover multiple thematic areas of official statistics.
Microsoft Teams will be used for this session - you will receive the link when you register for the event.
Code Surgery
On Wednesday 27 November 2019 we ran our first hour-long drop-in Code Surgery session in the coffee shop. We are planning to run further Code Surgery sessions in the future, further details will be made available near the time.
This will be an opportunity to discuss any coding problems you are having, or perhaps find better ways of solving issues. Open to coders of any level or those who have not started yet and want some guidance on how to begin.
Contributing
Note that resources are publicly accessible. When adding new content work on a branch and submit a pull request.
Folders should adhere to the following conventions:
YYYYMMDD_Topic_Name- All folders should contain a
README.mdwith notes or a brief explanation
Aim
The aim of the Coffee & Coding meetups is to nurture, enable and encourage a vibrant, supportive and inclusive coding community at ONS. Coffee & Coding provides a regular opportunity for people within ONS who are interested in coding to share skills and knowledge, provide advice and guidance to each other and generally network and get to know each other.
The format is generally 40 minutes for a presentation and questions to the presenter/s followed by an informal Code Surgery. The presentations usually take the form of a demonstration of a tool or technique and/or a show and tell of work done within the department using these methods. From time to time we will invite external speakers. The Code Surgery provides the opportunity for people to pose any coding related queries/ruminations/ideas to the gathered coding community.
Since there is often not enough time at the end of sessions for the Code Surgery we are considering running hour-long drop-in Code Surgeries, in the coffee shop, in addition to the presentation based monthly Coffee & Coding sessions.
We had our first drop-in Code Surgery on Wednesday 27 November 2019 and are planning to have the second session in January.
Coffee & Coding Schedule
Please note events are restricted to ONS employees, unless individual approval has been given. This repo contains details of Coffee and Coding events in Newport.
If you would like to attend the London ONS Coffee and Coding please check their Github repo for more information: https://github.com/datasciencecampus/coffee-and-coding-LDN.
| Date | Time | Room | Title | Presenter | Abstract |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thurs 24 June 2021 | 13:00 - 14:00 | Microsoft Teams | Turning spreadsheets into interactive web-tools | Alex Amaral-Rogers | The GSS Interactive Tools are a published series of web-based tools built to improve the accessibility of official statistics and is a crucial aspect of ONS’ work in improving the coherence of official statistics from across the UK. In this presentation, I’ll talk about how using spreadsheets for content and web-languages for templates, Python can rapidly produce web-ready products in seconds. I’ll also highlight how taking a flexible approach in designing the pipeline has paid dividends long-term by allowed the tools to grow to cover multiple thematic areas of official statistics. |
| Fri 14 May 2021 | 10:00 - 11:00 | Microsoft Teams | Coffee and Coding: Supervised machine learning to categorise job vacancies | Connor from BEIS | Within the Advanced Analytics team at BEIS, we recently carried out a supervised machine learning project, using python, to categorise job vacancies within the Burning Glass data we have in the department into STEM PhD subjects. Along with the Longitudinal Educational Outcome data from DfE, we began analysing the supply, demand and average wages for STEM PhD graduates. In this Coffee and Coding session, we will explain the key stages within this project and the challenges we faced, as well as answer any questions you may have. |
| Fri 26 February 2021 | 13:00 - 14:00 | Microsoft Teams | How to write good tests quickly and efficiently | Mitchell Edmunds | Mitch has personally written over 100 tests as part of the consumer prices transformation project. In this talk he’ll share his top tips for writing tests and creating test data. He’ll also explain how to structure your tests so that test scripts become an important part of your project’s documentation. |
| Tues 24 November 2020 | 14:00 - 15:00 | Microsoft Teams | Nature of RAP: Crime stats table automation | Shannan Child & Greg Rose | In March the Centre for Crime and Justice kicked off the ‘Nature of Crime’ RAP project with the aim to automate the 206 annual tables published from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). We developed two reproducible analytical pipelines, in R and Python, in collaboration with the Best Practice and Impact team. The pipelines pick up the CSEW data, run the necessary manipulations and produce the final, fully formatted workbooks ready for publication. What previously took 13 analysts 3-weeks to produce, can now be created within an hour. We published the tables and the code that sits behind them in September and we are keen to share our learning of RAP and working with new coding tools. |
| Fri 26 June 2020 | 13:30 - 14:30 | Google Hangouts | NLP with Jonathon | Jonathon Mellor | “My colleague (23M) keeps generating fake forum posts, what do I do?” - Using data from Reddit's r/relationships forum, NLP and deep learning we will look at the processes and challenges involved in generating stylised text. This session will not assume experience with NLP or neural networks, some basic machine learning will be helpful. |
| Wed 27 May 2020 | 13:00 - 14:00 | Google Hangouts | Building a python package for reproducible statistical tables | David Foster | Good Practice Tables (gptables) is a Python package for reproducibly writing statistical tables, which makes it easy to follow good practice guidance. This beginner-to-intermediate session will discuss why reproducibility is important and will introduce how creating and using packages can assure reproducibility in your analyses |
| Fri 21 February 2020 | 14:00 - 15:00 | NPT R.103 | R Shiny Dashboards | Dan Shiloh, Anthony Edwards & Ken Hughes | Shiny is a package that makes it incredibly easy to build interactive web applications with R. This beginner-to-intermediate session will cover what Shiny is/can do, how you can use it in the ONS and demonstrate an highly customized dashboard that has been developed in Best Practice and Impact. |
| Thur 16 Jan 2019 | 14:00 - 15:00 | NPT D.289 | Natural Language Processing with Time Series Analysis | Ian Grimstead | A hands-on Python tutorial in a Jupyter notebook, covering the use of natural language processing to detect popular terminology within patents, and visualise the usage of such terminology over time. The techniques are applicable to any collection of texts, only requiring dates if you also wish to carry out time series analysis. |
| Tues 17 Dec 2019 | 10:30 - 11:30 | NPT D.289 | RAP in DAP | Wil Roberts | The Reproducible Analytical Pipeline (RAP) is a methodology for automating the bulk of the steps involved in creating a statistical report. This beginner-to-intermediate interactive session will demonstrate some good practices in building RAP in DAP. |
| Wed 27 Nov 2019 | 10:30 - 11:30 | Coffee Shop (NPT.R111) | Coffee & Coding Code Surgery Drop-In Session | - | An opportunity to discuss any coding problems you are having or perhaps find better ways of solving issues. Open to coders of any level or those who have not started yet and want some guidance on how to begin. |
| Tues 12 Nov 2019 | 11:00 - 12:00 | NPT D.289 | Overview of Code Testing | David Pugh & Ian Grimstead | An introduction and overview of different testing approaches, discussing why we would test and trying to decide the best testing approach to use. We will also look at a worked example of Test Driven Development. |
| Thur 12 Sept 2019 | 11:00 - 12:00 | NPT D.289 | Department for Transport R Extravaganza | Tamsin Forbes & Hannah Bougdah | Presenting from their just out R-cookbook, aimed at DfT analysts |
| Tue 23 Aug 2019 | 10:30 - 11:30 | NPT D.289 | The principles and practice of Git | Fero Hajnovic & Jacob Hamblin-Pyke | A more indepth look at using Git, plus a lightning talk from the DAP CATS |
| Mon 22 Jul 2019 | 14:00 - 15:00 | NPT R.103 | Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP) | Catrin Cheung and Josh Halls | Introduction to RAP, and how they can be used to improve the quality and efficiency of our statistics |
| Tue 11 Jun 2019 | 14:30 - 15:30 | NPT R.103 | Best Practice == Clean Code | Skevi Pericelous | 9 elements of clean code for best practice, and examples of good/bad practice with discussions for causes, and how code can be improved. |
| Tue 14 May 2019 | 11:00 - 12:00 | NPT R.103 | Show-and-Tell Carousel | Ryan Schofield, Vinny Anand-Kumar, Lewis Edwards | multiple ONS colleagues presenting examples of coding software they've used (R and Python) in their work, and how to get started doing the same |
| Tue 16 Apr 2019 | 10:30 - 11:30 | NPT D.289 | Building Skills for DAP | Isabela Breton | What the Data Science Campus is doing as a partner to build skills for DAP |
| Thur 14 Mar 2019 | 10:00 - 11:00 | NPT D.289 | Be More Functional | Gareth Clews | Gareth live coding in python to give attendants a new view on how to formulate and solve problems. |
| Tue 19 Feb 2019 | 10:00 - 11:00 | NPT D.289 | Problem Solving with LEGO | Ian Grimstead | Interactive session (involving LEGO!) thinking about good practices involve in solving problems with code. |
| Tue 15 Jan 2019 | 10:00 - 11:00 | NPT D.289 | "What is Coffee and Coding?", Lightning Talk: two mentoring programs | Rose Almond & Skevi Pericelous | What Coffee and Coding is, a description of Data Science mentoring programs and how to apply, and then a Code Surgery (with R standards game) |
| Tue 27 Nov 2018 | 10:00 - 12:00 | NPT R103 | "What is Coffee and Coding?" and "An Introduction to Data Science Tools" | Luke Shaw & David Pugh | What Coffee and Coding is across government and the plan for ONS, and an introduction to some of the various tools used in Data Science and when to use them - with a focus on R and Python. |