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Our thoughts on technology and design

Data Engineering
Apache Spark has quickly become the largest open source project in big data, but why has it suddenly got so much momentum behind it?
Tech
Literally a couple of hours after we released the previous post on writing a RESTful API with ASP.NET 5, I learned that Microsoft have renamed the new platform. This is a very short summary of that decision.
Tech
This blog describes my first experience of writing a RESTful API with Microsoft's new MVC 6 framework which is due to be released as part of ASP.NET 5 in early 2016.
Testing
When automating end to end browser verification, how do you keep it simple, make it robust and enable flexibility within your automated checks. One way is to use helpers.
Testing
Six annoyingly awkward bug patterns that every tester should know...
Data Engineering
Big data is one of those buzz phrases that gets thrown round a lot, companies love saying they work with ‘Big’ data, but what is ‘Big’ data?
People
A glimpse into working life for new software developers and testers in the first few weeks of Scott Logic's graduate programme.
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.
Tech
Most popular tech blog posts of 2015
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.

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