Mapping £2.6 billion of farm payments

Farmers in England are paid via the Environmental Stewardship Scheme to keep their land in good agricultural and environmental condition. This scheme is smaller than the better-known CAP payments, but still accounts for around £3 billion of public funding over…

My year-and-a-bit working on tech-for-good projects

In the past year or so I did a lot of work on public-interest tech and data projects. I was so busy writing code, designing systems and hiring people that I failed to write anything at all about why these…

Introducing… What Size Am I

For many women, there are few things more frustrating than trying on clothes. To put it in terms that my (mostly male) coder friends will understand: debugging CSS doesn’t come close to the blood-boiling irritation of trying to work out…

Train times v. house prices: the commuter belt, on a graph

We’re house-hunting. And for me, like most coders, house-hunting involves lots and lots and lots of screen-scraping. As well as crawling Rightmove listings, I’ve been looking at transport and house-price data. Specifically, I’ve scraped travel times to London by train…