Another year in the tank - I’ll keep the post fairly short this time. It was a productive year at work, helping Met Office to realise some of their socio-economic benefits by publishing multiple products to open data initiatives. A two-year rolling archive of global deterministic atmospheric forecast data can be found on the Registry of Open Data on AWS, alongside a few other Met Office datasets we’ve made available this year.
We also released the first Met Office products on the Snowflake Marketplace.
I’ve enjoyed getting to grips with the platform and honing my data engineering skills. I even used Snowflake to perform some analysis on the impact of weather in football, which I’ve written about HERE.
Data science and analysis, particularly in relation to football, continues to be of huge interest to me. In my spare time, I’ve volunteered as a data analyst for Plymouth Argyle Football Club. This has mainly involved developing various tools for the recruitment team using the R Shiny framework. These include:
- A Wyscout player recruitment tool. Displays radar, scatter and swarm graphs for player metrics, using a player scoring model built on Wyscout data.
- A rolling team/player data tracker, presenting the rolling average of metrics for both players and teams using Statsbomb API data.
- A scout reporting dashboard, tracking the players assigned to each scout and their reports.
- A recruitment target monitoring dashboard.
These made use of scatter charts, radars, swarm graphs and other visualisations.
In 2025 I’m hoping to further my knowledge and experience in the fields of data science and analysis. I recently read Ian Graham’s very interesting book “How to Win The Premier League”, about his tenure as Head of Research at Liverpool Football Club. I’ve also begun working through some data science courses on Khan Academy, which is a brilliant free resource.
Favourites of 2024
Here are some of the media releases I enjoyed this year:
Games
- Astrobot
- Balatro
- Animal Well
- Marvel Rivals
- Still Wakes the Deep
- Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
- Portal: Revolution
- The Rise of the Golden Idol
- Arranger
- Braid: Anniversary Edition
- Mind Over Magnet
Movies
- Civil War
- Challengers
- Dune: Part Two
- Strange Darling
- Speak No Evil
- Heretic
- The Substance
- Anora
- Alien: Romulus
- Love Lies Bleeding
- Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
- Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Albums
- JPEGMAFIA - I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU
- Kendrick Lamar - GNX
- The Smile - Wall of Eyes
- Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us
- NxWorries - Why Lawd?
- Geordie Greep - The New Sound
- Charli XCX - Brat
- Fontaines D.C. - Romance
- Jamie xx - In Waves
- Colin Stetson - the love it took to leave you
- Father John Misty - mahashmashana
TV Shows
- Fargo Season 5
- Ripley
- The Day of the Jackal
- Baby Reindeer
- Fallout
- Shogun
- The Penguin
- Rivals
- True Detective: Night Country
- Mr Bates vs the Post Office