welcome

Our Aricles

• Doing more with markdown

  Markdown allows you to create good-looking documents quickly without needing fancy tools and packages, it is entirely text based. This site is made with markdown. But what about diagrams, equations, charts and videos? In this article we give a quick demonstration of what is possible and show you where to find out about a whole lot more.

• An Elf is not just for Christmas

  Christmas is a busy time for elves, digital or otherwise. The Digital Elf project is all about self contained nuggets of digital transformation that perform a repetitive job to relieve some burden from hard-pressed healthcare workers. In the case of our Twelf Days of Christmas, think of the pages of this site as those digital elves, spreading the word while the masters get on with Christmas.

• Our first delivery: Auto-TeaCH

  Today we talk about the path by which The DigitalElf Project’s biggest piece of work came into existence: Auto-TeaCH. Firstly we talk about why.

• Nyeeeeh, what's up doc?

  Producing documents is unavoidable, but digital elves can help. In this article we look at how using plain text marked up with basic formatting instructions opens the door to a world of automation.

• Plotting a course on jupyter

  We humans know very well the saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. The elves have an equally important maxim - ‘A million numbers sure do need a picture’. Many digitalElves of yore inserted charts in spreadsheets to show ever-falling waiting times for battery replacment in elfHospitals, as technology assisted elfcare became ever more sophisticated.

• Exploring data in jupyter

  Given that we arrived with the elves in jupyter only yesterday and that we have come so far from home it is worth having a nose around. Today we introduce the basics of dataset exploration. This we can do very well in our new jupyter home.

• Jupyter notebooks and data visualisation

  In this article we introduce jupyter notebooks. Once you are a fledged data science elf it is quite likely that you will spend as much time in jupyter as at the North Pole. The jupyter notebook is like a lab notebook for exploration of data - it allows you to mix explanatory text with code, data and visualisations such as plots to document your course through the area you are investigating.

• Regular expressions

  To process data you very often need to understand and use regular expressions. In this article we introduce them and use them to solve the Advent of Code Day 1 challenge.

• Online tools for your micro project

  A micro project is a piece of teamwork that takes no longer than a few days to complete. There are lots of tools to help you achieve that.

• My first program. Roman Numerals.

  In our previous post we learned about Excel functions and how to write our own functions in Excel’s built-in code editor. We also learned about testing and refactoring. Today we put all that into action and write our first program.

• Goodbye Excel sheets, hello Pandas

  If you can see how to solve a problem in an Excel spreadsheet, there is a good chance you can do the same in Python using its Pandas library. In today’s article we introduce Pandas and see how similar they are to spreadsheets.

• Getting into programming: tools

  If you study computer science you could be forgiven for not realising that programmers use tools; all that matters is the mighty language compiler. In practice, tools such as shells, editors, version control, testing frameworks and linters are what programmers spend most of their time interacting with. Getting your toolset right can turn programming from a frustrating chore into a satisfying, productive activity.

• Getting into programming with Excel

  If you want to get into programming, Excel is an easy way to do it. Everyone has it on their laptop or work computer so you don’t need to worry about installing software or getting permission to use it. That is important because to become an effective progammer you need to practice. It is as easy as openning Excel and typing a few key strokes. So, please have Excel open as you read this article and follow along.

• Starting a digital project in minutes not months

  Digital Elf projects often come out of a conversation on WhatsApp. To get going they need a website, some email addresses, somewhere to keep the code and a project management tool. How long does that take? For The Digital Elf project itself, the site you are looking at now, we started at 3pm on a Friday and fitting it around everything else that was going on, by Sunday morning we had all the basics in place. This post explains how we did that in the hope that you can do something similar when starting your project.

• Welcome to The Digital Elf Project

  Today we launch The Digital Elf Project, spreading the magic of software throughout healthcare systems, such as the NHS. Welcome to readers who have come as a result of our BMJ article. For those who haven’t, here it is: An elf service for the NHS