Resources
Data lakes? Most Financial Service organisations either have one or are considering one. This white paper explains key considerations and a warning to help guide their creation or optimisation to fulfil its requirement
Cloud
AWS recently announced a couple of new container services, EKS and Fargate, and I'll give a brief overview, a "first experience" walkthrough of Fargate, and discuss when you might want to choose it.
Tech
Over the past couple of months I’ve been exploring the potential of WebAssembly. I wanted to try my hand at creating a more complex WebAssembly application, which is why I’ve been spending my evenings working on a CHIP-8 emulator ... and learning Rust!
Tech
As interns at the Newcastle office we were tasked with creating an interactive desk directory to allow new employees to better acquaint themselves with their building and colleagues, with the speculative goal of replacing the company-wide internal phone directory. The original brief specified we should present a graphical view of the office layout generated from an existing office plan stored in Google Sheets.
Open Source
A few weeks ago the new Bristol Pound mobile app was launched, allowing users of this local currency to find vendors, view transactions and make payments on both iOS and Android. This post describes our experience of writing this application using React Native.
Tech
Last week I took a trip to London to attend CodeMesh, the Alternative Programming Conference. Attending conferences can be a way to expand your horizons and inspire interest in a variety of topics, and CodeMesh did this for me and more, with a great line-up of experienced speakers. Here I'll describe a few of the talks I attended.
Tech
I'll be taking a first look at Polymer 3.0, including how to integrate other technologies, as well as comparing it with other front-end frameworks.
Tech
A common misconception I have frequently observed in organisations that are adopting agile is around using story points for planning, forecasting and progress tracking. Long- and mid-term planning in agile can have devastating effects on teams, which is why I’d like to shed some light on it and talk about how the situation can be tackled in an agile way providing much better results for the project and the organisation itself.
Tech
A quick guide to the available source map options in webpack, and the considerations for choosing one in different scenarios.
Tech
In this blog post I'll take a look at a real-world application of WebAssembly (WASM), the re-implementation of D3 force layout. The end result is a drop-in replacement for the D3 APIs, compiled to WASM using AssemblyScript (TypeScript).
Tech
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Video
JavaScript is the dominant force on the web and increasingly the desktop too, but what about on the server? This talk looks at server-side JavaScript within the context of serverless architectures, a cloud-computing pattern with zero configuration, automatic scaling and a pay-per execution model.
People
Following the success of Scott Logic's first Bugathon in Newcastle last March, members of the Edinburgh and Newcastle teams grouped together to organise another Bugathon at Heriot-Watt University's Edinburgh campus. Held on Wednesday, October 18th, this post gives an insight into the work carried out by Scott Logic to prepare and run the event.
Tech
In this blog post I'll explore the various different ways you can create WebAssembly modules, using Emscripten, LLVM and AssemblyScript, comparing the tooling and performance.
Data Engineering
Apache Kafka provides distributed log store used by increasing numbers of companies and often forming the heart of systems processing huge amounts of data. This post shows how to use it for storing meteorological data and displaying this in a graphical dashboard with Graphite and Grafana
Tech
JUnit 5 has been available for a few weeks now so in this post I will investigate setting it up and migrating from JUnit 4 then explore some of the new features available.
Delivery
Working for a Digital agile consultancy was my first real exposure to Government / Public Service projects. GDS provide an exceptional amount of process and control for any OGD (Originating Government Department) so trying to follow their rules, the client's wishes and employing a succesful agile delivery methodology can mean serving multiple masters. It did (sometimes) work out.
Data Engineering
A discussion about Cassandra consistency levels and replication factor, which are frequently misunderstood. This post explains the Cassandra infrastructure and how its configuration can be tuned.
Testing
Having good tests is vital for maintaing code but it is difficult to assess the quality of your tests. Mutation testing provides one way of evaluating your tests. In this post I will be using PIT with Java to demonstrate the capabilities of mutation testing.
Delivery
If you're new to Agile you've probably heard the term Story Point a few times and, especially if you come from a more traditional project management or product background, you may be trying to figure out what a Story Point is and how big one is. This article tries to explain what this is in a more digestible format.
Tech
Creating asynchronous functions that are recursive can be a bit of a challenge. This blog post takes a look at various different approaches, including callbacks and promises, and ultimately demonstrates how async functions result in a much simpler and cleaner solution.