Testing
When Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink about the power of the subconscious in 2005, a heuristic was named for it. Read on for how blink testing works, and some further thoughts on how other ideas the book contained can influence your testing.
Tech
I have recently been using a set of tools called fastlane, developed by Felix Krause. fastlane helps to automate the steps involved in building and deploying iOS applications to the App Store.
Tech
I mentioned in the previous post that I would create a plugin for less which converted from LTR to RTL. Here is a tutorial post on creating that plugin.
Tech
Some languages of the world (Arabic, Hebrew etc.) are RTL, meaning they are read right-to-left, instead of left-to-right. Typically in web applications supporting one of these languages, everything is reversed, meaning scroll bars, progress indicators, buttons etc.
Tech
Swift has access to all of the Objective-C APIs, which means that anything you could do with Objective-C you can now do with Swift. However, there are times when it is worth exploring a better, pure-Swift, alternative. This post explores the pros and cons of KVO versus a couple of Swift alternatives.
Tech
Swift does not have a built in eventing mechanism. This post explores a few different ways events can be implemented in Swift and how to avoid problems of retain cycles and closure reference equality.
Tech
This blog looks at how CSS flexbox layout can be applied to SVG in order to simplify the task of constructing charts with D3. This approach has been made possible by the JavaScript flexbox implementation that Facebook recently open sourced to support ReactJS Native.
Tech
The upcoming JavaScript standard ES6 introduces generators, which provides us with a new pattern for writing asynchronous code. I compare this pattern to the established patterns of callbacks and Promises.
Tech
Swift doesn't support throwing exceptions, nor does it support catching them. This wouldn't be a problem if you could develop iOS apps in pure Swift, but unfortunately at the moment you cannot.
Tech
TypeScript 1.4 was released last Friday, bringing union types, type aliases, and some ES6-related features. It also brought a new compiler and language services API to facilitate better tool support. Here I'll give a brief introduction with some pointers on places to get started.
Testing
There are many ways of testing software within an Agile methodology, here are 7 things I learned.
Testing
It has become generally accepted that a good project has a set of automated tests behind it - whether they be unit tests, integration tests or end-to-end tests. However I don't often hear people talking about the benefits vs cost and how much should be spent on particular projects.
Tech
Now that I've completed the Scala MOOC I thought I'd go back and re-implement the assignments in Clojure to get a better understanding of the differences between these two languages
Tech
I’ve recently completed an ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana) real-time log processing implementation for an HTML5 FX trading platform. Along the way I’ve learnt a few things I wish I’d known beforehand. This post shares some more details of the project and hopefully some time saving tips.
Tech
How to create hero transitions with AngularJS, similar to those implemented by Google's Material Design and Polymer's core-animated-pages.
Tech
Some lessons I've learned trying to optimise a HTML5 mobile App so that it's fast and responsive even on old or budget phones with limited performance.
Tech
This blog post looks at a few techniques that can be used to remove the deeply nested if-let statements that are a common sight in Swift code.
Tech
I have spent the last 12 weeks continuing the Foyer Screen project. In this post I describe the Admin Panel which I created to allow dynamic editing of presentation content and share a little of what I've learned in my time at Scott Logic, including some useful resources for getting started with Angular JS.
Delivery
Over the past year, I worked on a large project which saw a dramatic shift towards a more Agile way of working. In this post, I will run through exactly what changed, how it made our project better, and what you can do to become more Agile.
Tech
This post introduces 'Bramble MVC', a prototype static site generator which aims to be a little different from existing static site generators by having an API resembling a dynamic web server.