John Walk

John is a data scientist and machine-learning engineer. He first was introduced to data and ML in Python in his academic work as a plasma physicist, but now does it full time! His work at Pluralsight focuses on building scalable data and ML pipelines for the Search & Explore team, delivering discoverable and relevant content to users.

Outside of work, he spends much of his time hiking, rock & ice climbing, and mountaineering. While most of his experience is in the excellent White Mountains of New Hampshire, he’s also logged ascents of Mt. Rainier (14,411’) in Washington, and Ixtaccíhuatl (17,159’) and Pico de Orizaba (18,491’) in Mexico. He also enjoys board and tabletop games, and has worked for several years as an Enforcer at the PAX gaming conventions teaching new & unreleased board games.

Synthwave Styling Data Visualizations in Python with Altair

By John Walk

The dream of the '80s is alive in my new favorite Python visualization tool.

Nickname Generation with Recurrent Neural Networks with PyTorch

By John Walk

Recurrent Neural Network architectures are a potent way to model and generate sequential data, especially for tasks like working with human language. Let's build one over individual characters to generate cheeky nicknames!

Data Processing with Dask

By John Walk

It's remarkably easy to reach a point where our typical Python tools don't really scale suitably with our data in terms of processing time or memory usage. The Dask library joins the power of distributed computing with the flexibility of Python development for data science, with seamless integration to common Python data tools. Let's build a simple data pipeline for working with text data.

Python CLI Utilities with Poetry and Typer

By John Walk

Python is exceptionally flexible as a scripting language - let's learn how to extend simple scripts into full-featured command line utilities.

Managing Python Environments

By John Walk

If you're not careful, your Python environment can quickly become a disaster. We'll walk through the available tools to be more (code) environmentally friendly and establish some (highly opinionated) preferences for setting up Python.

Porting Flask to FastAPI for ML Model Serving

By John Walk

Due to its simplicity, Flask is a very popular web framework for building REST APIs in Python - particularly for serving Machine Learning models. Here we'll learn how to migrate to the newer FastAPI framework to take advantage of advances in type checking & asynchronous programming.