Blog

Our thoughts on technology and design

Tech
A quick look at Apache Storm with a short word count walk-through example using a Redis Database.
Tech
If you're a fan of Redux Saga then you will have noticed the abundance of libraries to assist testing your sagas. This post takes an in-depth look into the different approaches to testing sagas, describing where five popular testing libraries fit into these approaches.
Tech
In this post, I create an interactive map of relative changes in currency strength, using D3's geographic projections, world map data, and a currency exchange API.
Delivery
Being software developer requires technical insight and analytical approach. Yet, this is just part of the role. This article explores soft skills that are important part of every software developers life.
Tech
I show a simple use of the PostGIS Postgres database extension to combine route data from Strava and postcode data.
Testing
The focus of this article is not on finding advantages or disadvantages of Selenium WebDriver, but I mainly focus on investigating pros and cons of different tools/frameworks in combination with Selenium WebDriver. Thus this article is good for those who already know Selenium and would like to gain knowledge of using different tools in combination with Selenium.
Delivery
In our professional work life we regularly come across difficult people we’d love to avoid, ignore or get away from - this is especially true if you are a consultant or contractor and work with so many different people. In reality however, we have to collaborate also with difficult people. In this article I want to look at the situations, types of people and some techniques that can help.
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 · 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.

Authors