Blog

Our thoughts on technology and design

Sustainability
The Scott Logic sustainability team has recently added significant new content to the open-source Technology Carbon Standard website. Here we summarise the recent changes to the site and what we're looking to add next.
Delivery
We’ve had some really good results using Kanban on a product development project. During this blog post I’ll introduce the situation we initially found ourselves in, give some background as to what Kanban is, then walk through some of the things we did.
Artificial Intelligence
Accurate weather forecasting helps us make decisions every day, from the trivial to the critical. I take a look at the technology that goes into predicting the weather, and consider how the AI revolution could change that.
Sustainability
The Scott Logic sustainability team has recently added significant new content to the open-source Technology Carbon Standard website. Here we summarise the recent changes to the site and what we're looking to add next.
Testing
Story narration inspired blog post on the process of manually testing chatbot AI.
Podcast
In this episode, Oliver Cronk is joined by experts including Jeremy Axe, Group CTO at DS Smith, and consultants Darren Smith and Katie Davis from Scott Logic. Together, they unpack topics like the energy usage and carbon emissions of IT infrastructure, the challenges in accurately measuring sustainability, and whether claims of ‘green tech’ are substantiated or just hype.
Sustainability
We're excited to announce a proposed standard for assessing technology-related carbon emissions – an approach to classifying an organisation's technology footprint in a way that enables consistent analysis and benchmarking of the carbon impact, aligned with the GHG protocol.
Tech
If you work in banking in the US, you should care about Open Banking. To help argue the case, I look at the legal changes in the US that will likely push towards an Open Banking standard and argue that implementing Open Banking can reduce your regular operational costs as a bank.
People
Creating high-performing organic content in crowded markets is no mean feat. I explore SEO practices and value props to put you on the right track.
Tech
On Saturday I attended UKGovCamp XL in London. UKGovCamp is an annual, free public sector digital unconference, which means there’s no set agenda, and anyone attending can propose, host or participate in sessions. I share my reflections on the event in this blog post.
Podcast
In this episode, I'm joined by Rebecca Rumbul, CEO of Rust Foundation, and Mirko Boehm from Linux Foundation Europe. We discuss the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), a piece of EU legislation that is actively under development, designed to make end-user products more secure. Early drafts of this act detailed significant obligations on open source maintainers, despite the fact that they often work without financial reward. We discuss how the latest update of the CRA has thankfully addressed these concerns and ponder whether it will actually solve the problems it has set out to tackle.
Artificial Intelligence
When we couldn't find a tool to meet our prompt engineering needs, we decided to create a universal tool that allows anyone to build their own – all within the familiar spreadsheet environment. An Excel add-in that lets you use OpenAI models in Excel formulas.
Artificial Intelligence
In this blog, we will be sharing our feedback on the free fast.ai course - that has been praised by many for its hands-on and top-down approach - along with a list of additional material that we found helpful in fully understanding the course.
Sustainability
The goal of this post is to introduce some tools and techniques you can use to figure out what's the most effective climate action you can take given your circumstances. I'll give some examples of ways you can use your skills as a software developer to help out with climate solutions.
Delivery
Here, Chris Ferguson discusses why the face of public sector technology should be able to implement timely, meaningful change – and how waste can guide you in the right direction.
Artificial Intelligence
Recently I’ve been learning about Neural Networks and how they work. In this blog post I write a simple introduction in to some of the core concepts of a basic layered neural network.
Tech
A brief look into building out a NextJS application which makes use WebAssembly to solve Advent Of Code puzzles in the browser.
Sustainability
Many of us love a good podcast so I reached out to our project team to see what they were listening to in the tech and sustainability space. Here are their recommendations
Artificial Intelligence
We’ve undertaken experiments to explore the impact of GenAI tools on developer productivity, revealing a 37% improvement in productivity (speed), however, this result is a misrepresentation of what it means to be productive as a developer. This article delves more deeply, beyond punchy metrics, to explore the overall experience of working with these entirely new tools. We discuss where these tools are most effective, the challenge of quality code, the learning curve and much more.
Artificial Intelligence
Developing LLM applications using Test-Driven Development principles can be expensive due to the incurred cost of every usage. In this post, we discussed how our attempt to tackle the inherit non-deterministic nature of LLMs increased our operational costs and the techniques we employed to minimise them.

Authors