Only one in nine FIDE rated players is a woman, and when The Queen's Gambit promised a revolution, I went looking for it in the numbers. Across 130 monthly FIDE snapshots, a Prophet forecast and a Monte Carlo simulation, the verdict was quietly damning: the boom was real, it just happened somewhere the federation could not see.
When the internship hunt dropped me into a LinkedIn feed that was wall to wall AI slop, I built a tool to fight back. It reads any post and scores how much it reeks of the machine, a deliberate fifty-fifty split between transparent rules and a zero-shot classifier, then prints the verdict on a shareable card. Built in roughly fourteen hours, plus a crash course in Figma.
A person in the UK is likelier to become a millionaire than a care leaver is to reach a top university. Built from public DfE and UCAS data as an interactive scrollytelling piece, this is a personal project and a personal story: more care leavers reach university than ever, yet the higher you look, the wider the gap grows, until it becomes a chasm.
Force yearly seasonality onto under two years of data and Prophet fits it anyway, splitting trend and seasonality in ways that quietly shift between Stan versions. Issue #2709 had logged it and left it open. Rather than chase the maths, I made the model warn about itself: nine lines in the forecaster that flag when it is under identified, and thirty three lines of tests proving it stays silent when the history is long enough or the setting is left on auto. Merged into main on 1 August 2026 and shipped in v1.4.0.
"This is AMAZING!!!"
London Women's Chess Club"this is so cool!!! i'm inspired to write my own data story — wow!!! i love the show Queen's Gambit (coming from someone who knew nothing about chess) and it's so cool seeing its impact in real time!!"
Reader · Codédex"what a juicy morning read."
London Women's Chess Club"It would be so nice to receive a talk on this work — so diligently put together. I for one would come along!"
Member · London Women's Chess Club"incredible work Anna. very very impressed."
CEO · Codédex"That's probably why your research landed with me. It's not just a portfolio piece — it connects lived experience, insight and evidence, and it says something important about how care-experienced young people can be underestimated."
On the Care Leavers story
