Tim Denning is one of the most successful figures in the self-improvement & entrepreneurial blogging culture. With over 140k followers and 100 million views on Medium alone, it’s clear he’s got this game figured out.

I love writing articles like these, but I obviously can’t do it as well as he can. But maybe I don’t have to.

What I can do (I thought, naively) is feed a machine learning model all of the articles on timdenning.com and get it to auto-generate whole articles for me in his style!

How wrong I was.

After doing hours of model training on articles scraped from timdenning.com, generating sentences mostly yielded vaguely Tim-Denning-esque nonsense like…

Let’s say you’ve just made a Python script that does something cool like analysing Tweets or automates image deep frying in a Facebook Messenger group chat. These are great, but you need them to run 24/7 to get the best out of them and you don’t want to leave your laptop running all the time: that’s just annoying!

What if I told you there’s a way you can host your Python script, exactly how you’re running it on your laptop, easily and for free? …

I’m in a meme group-chat on Facebook Messenger, and sometimes a situation arises (naturally) where an image just needs to be deep fried. In this circumstance we have to use an online service, taking valuable minutes out of the day. It’s this exact type of minor inconvenience that bots are perfect for solving.

Wouldn’t it be great, I thought to myself, if saying the phrase “Can I request a deep fry” triggers a bot to automatically deep fry the last image sent to the chat? Yes, yes it would.

(If you don’t know what deep frying refers to, please see this…

Diving deeper into the FBChat library and Deeppyer

I’m in a meme group-chat on Facebook Messenger, and sometimes a situation arises (naturally) where an image just needs to be deep fried. In this circumstance we have to use an online service, taking valuable minutes out of the day. It’s this exact type of minor inconvenience that bots are perfect for solving.

Wouldn’t it be great, I thought to myself, if saying the phrase “Can I request a deep fry” triggers a bot to automatically deep fry the last image sent to the chat? Yes, yes it would.

(If you don’t know what deep frying refers to, please see this…

*This work is a personal project and not affiliated with Dyson in any way*

This project began, as all things seem to do nowadays, with COVID-19. With the amount of free time I was gifted, I decided the only logical way to spend it was programming. As an undergraduate at the Dyson Institute, I thought it would be interesting to see how the wider company was perceived by the public. So, armed with £300 worth of free Google Cloud credits I decided to give it a go.

It just so happened that the week I let my finished code run was the week of the largest redundancies in company history. Meaning in no way to make light of hundreds of people losing their jobs, it did end up being the perfect test environment for this project, and made for some very interesting results. If you don’t care about how I went about making this work, skip to the end for a breakdown of the findings. …