Tech
In this post, I investigate the HTML5 Web Audio API, using it with D3 to perform real-time audio visualisation.
Tech
This blog shows how to get started with microservices using Dropwizard. It guides the reader through building a simple task-list service.
Tech
Angular 2.0 introduces a component-based approach to building applications, where the rendering can be optimised by selecting a suitable change detection strategy for each component. This post looks at how the OnPush change detection strategy works quite elegantly with the concept of immutable objects as enforced by Immutable.js.
Data Engineering
Welcome to my blog, Andrew's thoughts on Big Data. This page gives a little background on myself and the blog.
Tech
From my perspective Angular 2 is a great improvement over Angular 1. The framework is simpler, and as a result your code is more concise, making use of modern JavaScript concepts. However, this does come at a cost; with Angular 2 the required tooling is really quite complicated.
UX Design
I am often asked for recommended reading on design by people from all sorts of different backgrounds. My answers vary wildly depending on the person asking and the angle or topic I think might be most relevant to them. However, there are certain books that come up quite often so here are a rounded collection of recommendations. It may surprise some that only a handful of these books are actually about design but I strongly believe that you can learn as much, if not more, from outside the world of design. After all, analysing, understanding and repurposing are some of the most powerful skills for designers to hone.
Testing
Web testing, in simple terms, is checking your web application for potential bugs before the system is revealed to the public. When testing web applications, there are many different resources you can use to help your testing. But a great resource is browser developer tools which can help in many ways. Here are some of the ones I find most useful.
Delivery
This post explores continuous delivery within an agile context, and goes into detail about what it really means to be doing continuous delivery.
Testing
This is the second post in a series of simple and short tutorials for automating tests using Protractor. In this post we will look at the difference between isPresent and isDisplayed, and we will use getText and the matchers toContain and toEqual to create some tests.
Tech
This blog post takes a step-by-step approach to building a simple todo-list application with Angular 2.0. Along the way we'll look at web components, dependency injection, TypeScript, bindings and the Angular 2.0 change detection strategy which combine to make a much more elegant framework to its predecessor.
People
There’s a common misconception that there’s only one route into software engineering being one of them, but the truth is, the name of your degree is secondary to skills such as logical thinking, coding or testing ability, and arguably most importantly – passion. Here, two of our employees explain more.
Tech
OData Controllers offer an easy interface between data and your application, but require one controller per model type. These controllers often have a large amount of almost identical code. In this blog post, we look at using C# Generics to remove this duplication.
Tech
There aren't many examples of OAuth2 working with a SAML 2.0 as an authentication method on the Internet. The purpose of this post is to provide a simple implementation of these two technologies working together.
Tech
A few days ago Bloomberg published their list of 50 companies to watch in 2016, and for some reason they decided to publish the entire report in ASCII! I thought it would be a bit of fun to see if I could use D3 to create my own ASCI charts
Tech
Libraries like d3 and d3fc do a fantastic job at making interactive charts. However, when the data size is in the hundreds of thousands, performance suffers. In this post, I'll have a look at some sampling techniques recently implemented in d3fc, and show them off with a demo.
Data Engineering
This post demonstrates how to create an efficient stock ticker app using HTML5 WebSockets and a Haskell server.
Testing
This is the first post in a series of simple and short tutorials for automating tests using Protractor. In this post we will look at how to find page elements using the Chrome developer tools, and writing a simple test using the Jasmine matcher isDisplayed.
Tech
While d3fc (a toolkit of charting components built in the d3 style) embraces the philosophy of simplicity over performance, there's no point in creating a chart with lousy performance. In this post I'll run through some of the tips and tricks for squeezing the best performance out of d3fc without compromising on its flexibility.
Tech
Saturday marked the fifth annual DDD North conference, held once again at the University of Sunderland. DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! events are volunteer-organised conferences where members of the community propose and vote on the agenda. ScottLogic took part this year as a Platinum-level sponsor. We had many fantastic conversations with developers from all across the country, plus our squishy rugby ball giveaways were very popular!