About

Hi, I'm Luqman.

My day job is all things data. I started out in academia doing signal processing, which is basically teaching computers to recognise things and then spending a lot of time figuring out why they got it wrong. After that I bounced around a few industries such as healthcare, banking, media and currently in supply chain. The specifics changed but the actual problem was always the same: data exists somewhere in a format that is useless, lets figure out what it means and make it not useless. Turns out that problem is everywhere.

Golf is the part where this got out of hand.

I played properly as a kid and through uni. Never broke into single digits. Sat just above ten for years, which if you've been there you know is its own specific kind of annoying. Not bad enough to have an excuse, not good enough to actually be good. Eventually I just stopped. Clubs went in the garage. Fifteen years went by faster than I would have liked.

Then I wanted to play again. So I tried to plan a trip.

It was a nightmare. Not the golf, the planning... OK maybe the golf too. But figuring out which courses were actually good, which ones were near each other, whether a temporary NZ Golf card was worth it for a week, none of that had a decent answer anywhere. Just a bunch of forum posts across different Facebook groups and a lot of browser tabs. So I did what any reasonable person with a data background and too much free time does: I built a solver, hooked it up to a weather API, put a UI on it, and now here we are.

FairwayPlan is that. You put in your dates, your regions, your budget, a rough sense of how keen you are on each day. It figures out a proper schedule with drive times, green fees and weather already sorted. The bit that used to take an evening now takes about thirty seconds.

If you're using it and have thoughts, or you're working on something similar, I'm always up for a chat.

Find me on LinkedIn.