Data Engineering
We've been comparing Cassandra and MariaDB in single node setups, exploring the issues of each in terms of performance and ease of use from a development perspective. In this article we explore the issues at play in such a setup such as the differences in queries, speed of response and the features that seperate these two technologies.
Tech
Level-up the state is perhaps the most useful React pattern. Apply it to your dependencies and you can get many benefits, like better tests, flow control and idempotent routes.
Tech
I downloaded an analysed the training data for 1,000 athlete who ran the London Marathon in 2016. From this data I've learnt that people put in ~30% less mileage than popular plans suggest, Sunday mornings are a firm favourite for long runs, and that Saturday morning parkruns are very popular!
Data Engineering
StreamSets Data Collector (SDC) is an open source tool for stream-based extracting, transforming and loading large quantities of data. It provides an easy to use UI on top of the underlying processing power of YARN and Spark Streaming with a large number of installable integrations with source and destination systems.
UX Design
This post looks at the pros and cons of some of the automated handoff tools available for designers to share style specs with developers.
People
We're hosting a Bugathon on 18th March in partnership with Newcastle University, find out about how we created it and what to expect on the day.
Data Engineering
With the advent of the Internet of Things, the world of Big Data couldn't be more relevant. This post gives an overview of technologies that achieve processing at scale and in real time.
Tech
I recently downloaded run data for the 7,190 athletes who recorded their London Marathon on Strava, a popular platform for runners and cyclists. This blog post visualises and analyses the data in various interesting ways.
Tech
OK, I’m a bit late; I intended this for the start of January, but this time last year I wrote a post on our most popular 2015 technical blogs. Here I am again!
Testing
After 18 months testing FX trading software I decided to create and share a heuristic cheat sheet to help explore trading apps.
Tech
Given the complexity of digital transformation, how does anyone faced with a responsibility to deliver get to grips with the issues and decide where to start?
UX Design
Facilitating UX workshops can be challenging when ideating with non-designers who have not participated in a UX workshop and are sceptical about its value. In this post, I suggest four tips for achieving successful UX workshops and gaining the trust of the more sceptical participants.
Tech
When creating d3 visualisations it's common to want some form of responsive layout. However, SVG and canvas don't provide a native way to do this. Most examples found online either use fixed dimensions or resort to some form of manual layout to achieve the required effect. This post introduces an alternative approach using CSS and custom elements.
Tech
In this post I will talk about Consumer Driven Contracts in Microservices architectures. I will also give an example of how to use Pact in a modern JavaScript application.
Testing
Fiddler's AutoResponder is a great tool to mock API Responses when you're testing front end logic. It's simple but provides some powerful testing options. This is a short post to show you how.
Tech
Recreating the data used for the Guardian's Unaffordable Country visualisation in Apache Spark.
Tech
A few days ago the roadmap for future Angular releases, starting with v.4 in March 2017, was unveiled. It once again made me re-visit my personal doubts about semantic versioning, the underlying issue being that it is great for computers, but bad for humans. Considering that people are the primary consumers of your libraries and frameworks this can’t be right? Perhaps a hybrid approach that combines both semantic and romantic versioning would keep both the computers and the humans happy?