The Diary

Writing on data, privacy & the craft.

A digital diary — a fusion of professional insight and personal narrative. Expert notes on data engineering, cloud, and privacy, with the occasional detour into books and life.

Inspiration Nov 10, 2024

Building a Reading Habit: Mindset, Purpose, and the Journey

For anyone who has ever struggled to read consistently — practical lifestyle tweaks, mindset shifts, and simple metrics to make reading a fulfilling part of life.

8 min read Read
Cloud Computing Aug 9, 2024

Enforcing and Validating Tags While Creating Resources Using Azure Policy

A practical guide to using Azure Policy to enforce required tags, validate their values, and create exemptions — the backbone of clean cloud governance and billing.

6 min read Read
Computer Science Jan 24, 2024

Differential Privacy

A beginner-friendly walk through differential privacy — epsilon, privacy budgets, dataset sensitivity, the Laplace and exponential mechanisms, and how it plays out in real data publishing and analysis.

12 min read Read
News Nov 30, 2022

Our Initiative to Help Local Businesses Featured on Douglas Magazine

Our University of Victoria research initiative to support local businesses through COVID-19 recovery was featured in Douglas Magazine.

1 min read Read
Technology Jun 8, 2020

Blockchain Analytics

Blockchain and private distributed ledgers through the lens of privacy-preserving data science — analytics techniques, visualization, data modelling with BlockchainDB, and benchmarking Ethereum, Parity, and Hyperledger.

11 min read Read
Inspiration May 28, 2020

Data Scientist Nanodegree from Udacity

Reflecting on graduating from Udacity's advanced Data Scientist Nanodegree — a program co-created by Airbnb, Starbucks, IBM, and Figure Eight.

1 min read Read
Cloud Computing Dec 21, 2016

Executing Long Running Tasks in Google App Engine — How To Do It?

Running background tasks for hours or days on Google App Engine using Task Queues — and the production scaling gotcha that catches most developers off guard.

3 min read Read
Technology Dec 15, 2016

Data Lake — Why Should We Use One?

As data volumes exploded, storage became the question. A look at what a data lake is, where the term came from, and how it complements — not replaces — the data warehouse.

3 min read Read
Computer Science Oct 31, 2016

Data Science — Understanding the Concept and Why It Is Important

What does a data scientist actually do? A simple, candy-shop analogy for the four core tasks — cleaning, analysis, statistics, and engineering — that make data science matter.

3 min read Read