Who We Are

Dr Grant Paton-Simpson

Grant has been an enthusiastic user of Python for many years and has delivered numerous conference talks, meetup presentations, and training sessions on the language. Grant's open source statistics application, SOFA Statistics (over 300,000 downloads to date) is completely written in Python as is the forthcoming replacement SOFA Lite. More recently, Grant has collaborated with Ben Denham to launch the When Of Python initiative aimed at ensuring Python lives up to its original promise of simplicity and elegance. Grant currently works in the Tech Insights team at 2degrees and was part of the Data Science Team at Qrious where he processed hundreds of billions of records using PySpark and Python.

Dr Ben Denham

Ben has a passion for teaching others how to get stuff done with technology; he has run training courses and co-presented training courses on a variety of technologies for software development. Ben currently consults as a data scientist applying machine learning and analytical techniques to help stakeholders get more value from their datasets in a variety of contexts. For his recently completed PhD thesis, in collaboration with Fisher & Paykel Appliances, Ben developed machine learning algorithms that can be applied despite common data deficiencies. Ben has over 12 years experience in software development and he previously worked as the original software architect for NZ security software startup DataMasque.

Resources