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Twenty one years ago today I left home and joined the Royal Air Force. Today I'm a lead software developer at Scott Logic and my career is very different, but I often reflect on my time in the military and the parallels between it and software development. To mark the event I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the subject.
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In agile teams the development team often has some, if not total control over the process of developing software. In this article I'll look at why I believe that's important and why I think we should care, and care passionately about the processes we use to develop software.
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Pride is a celebration centred in the LGBTQ community, and many corporations use it to show their solidarity. This can sometimes feel more like a performative rainbow-washing stance than anything meaningful. At Scott Logic we try to ensure that, day to day, we are always carrying out meaningful actions to promote inclusivity, and to make sure all our colleagues and clients know we truly believe in this.
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Embracing diversity and inclusion in workplaces is akin to using a multitude of colourful crayons to create vibrant and innovative solutions. In the dynamic realm of IT consultancy, diverse teams not only outperform homogeneous ones but also drive transformative change, making diversity and inclusion indispensable for success and industry leadership.
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In software development we often make the assumption that Agile is the best way to manage process on a project but just what do we mean by that, is it true and, if so, why are there so many examples of it not working for teams? In this post I try to take a deeper look at some of these questions.
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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.
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A blameless culture can have a huge positive impact on the way your team works, both internally and with others. In this post I'll explore what a blameless culture is, why it's important and how to promote it within your own team.
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Scott Logic has become a certified B Corp! So I wanted to share why that’s important for our business and what it means to me personally as someone who has been in the organisation for a long time.
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To a lot of people who identify as LGBTQIA+, coming out for the first time can be daunting enough. To some it’s celebrated, to some it’s met with relief and to others, unfortunately, it can be negative beyond belief. But here’s the catch, we have to do it again and again and again…
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Over the years, some organisations (including some I have been part of) have promoted the idea of ‘celebrating failure’, encouraging employees to be open when it comes to mistakes they have made in the past, in order to learn for the future. But how honest have we really been when doing this? And how can we celebrate failure in the right way?
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Ashleigh has been working alongside staff at Altitude Foundation for work experience this year. While on work experience, the team at Altitude Foundation tasked them with interviewing staff from Scott Logic to find out a bit about their careers and how young people could find a path into the tech industry.
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Lessons learned in my first two years as a developer, including the importance of learning from failure, avoiding comparison, developing soft skills, and networking.
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Those involved in managing organisations' environmental impact often point to the 'supply chain challenge', that is, the difficulty of measuring the GHG emissions associated with suppliers' goods and services. But most businesses are themselves also suppliers, so if we're all waiting for our suppliers to answer the question before we can, then we're stuck in a deadlock. This post shares our first (probably imperfect) stab at trying to progress this issue.
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After months of hard work, rattling lines of code away, time in meetings, questions, debates, pair programming, banging your head against the wall after hours spent on one elusive bug, new technologies, old technologies, refactoring, testing, polishing and then… the day arrives. Our grad project app is to be released into the wild, used by the very ones who created it.
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Every year at this time, I like to share my thoughts on the continuing relevance of Pride Month. This year, we're going to share insights from the Scott Logic team on what Pride and allyship mean to them, and why they value working in an inclusive environment. I get the ball rolling here.
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When people came to meet us at the Scott Logic stand at Women of Silicon Roundabout, we took the opportunity to ask them “What would make somewhere a most loved workplace for you?” We received over 200 responses and I reflect on the results in this post.
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Last week I attended 'Women of Silicon Roundabout' - the UK's largest tech event for women. Jess McEvoy and I delivered a workshop on 'How to build a business case for your next promotion'. I wanted to share some of the content more widely, including a Career Canvas tool for mapping out your goals and motivations, and to help you build your business case.
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A balanced overview of the WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2022 tries to answer the question, "Are international conferences worth all that time and effort?"
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Every June, I like to share my thoughts on the continuing relevance of Pride Month. At Scott Logic, we’ve adopted this year’s Northern Pride theme—Remember, Resist, Rise Up—and there are many good reasons why, from the personal to the political.
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In this article, I summarise the talks and workshops that I attended during the 2022 Scott Logic Grad Summit, an event that brought together 70 graduates who joined the company in the last two year, and share the insights that I gained as a tester from each event.
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Find out what happens during a Scott Logic Grad Week with this inside scoop of Grad Week February 2022 held in the Bristol office.
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Empowering Women to Lead Digital Transformation in Scotland (EWLDT) is a course delivered by Empowering You in association with the Scottish Digital Academy, Scottish Government and ScotlandIS. Here, two graduates of the Autumn 2021 cohort – Jen Campbell and Atika Bennamane – share their experiences of the course and some of the key learnings that have accelerated them along their leadership journey.
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I believe strongly that it's vital to showcase the women leaders in our industry; to me, it's the key to addressing the gender imbalance that holds our industry back. We all know representation matters - what you can see, you can be. But more than this, it’s the normalisation of women being in leadership positions that’s essential in closing the authority gap.
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So many companies – including Scott Logic – have created ‘one-size-fits-all’ working practices and cultures that are based on a range of assumptions about what ‘fits', while excluding swathes of people. I’m determined that we tackle this issue, and in this blog post I share our journey so far towards being as inclusive an employer as possible.
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In this talk, I present empathy as a skill that can be cultivated and explores ways of doing that. Anyone interested in building their empathy skills or cultivating empathy within their team or workplace can learn here about different types of empathy, the ways it can empower us and its practical application in our day-to-day jobs.
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Covid-19 has changed our lives in every possible way, but now that lockdowns are beginning to lift, it's important to take a moment to consider some changes that might have flown under the radar.
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Every year at this time, I celebrate Pride with my LGBTQ+ brothers, sisters and genderqueer family. For me, it’s a time each year when I come together with my LGBTQ+ family, friends (and those friends who have become my family) and allies in love and friendship. It’s a time when we can celebrate how far gay rights – our human rights – have come, but also recommit ourselves to the work yet to do. It’s a time when I remind myself of our history and the battles won in striving for equality for all, but also the ongoing need to teach tolerance and acceptance within our community and beyond it.
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The shift in thinking from discrete change projects to continuous product delivery and the evolution of the IT organisation to incorporate DevOps means that we can now be truly agile in technology delivery. But there is much more to business agility than technology. The barrier to further business agility is often the physical manifestation of the organisation itself.
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In this talk, Manila McLean, Newcastle Building Society CIO, and I reflect on our experiences and learnings from how we've led our respective businesses to address the challenges of the pandemic. We look ahead to how our organisations will be returning to the office - and what this means for ways of working, managing productivity and staff wellbeing.
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As part of our Look Up From Lockdown campaign, we’ve invited senior leaders from our clients’ organisations to reflect on their experiences and learnings from addressing the challenges of the pandemic, and to look ahead to how their organisations will be returning to the office. Having found the insights from others fascinating, we thought it was time we shared our own views. Here, Rob Smith discusses his and Scott Logic’s experiences through Lockdown
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Working remotely all of the time has been an unusual and disorienting experience for everyone at Scott Logic. But what has it been like for the more junior consultants, being onboarded onto their first client projects while physically isolated from each other?
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Everyone’s mental wellbeing has been put under unprecedented strain in the last 12 months, affecting all aspects of our work life and home life. In this talk, I explore the various stressors that affect our mental health and shares some strategies that will help you to improve your resilience.
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As part of our Look Up From Lockdown campaign, NatWest Group’s Chief Digital Information Officer Wendy Redshaw shares her experiences and learnings from addressing the challenges of the pandemic, and looks ahead to what the future holds and how the organisation will be returning to the office.
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I wanted to share my experiences of the Scott Logic recruitment process from initial contact through to securing the job (with a lockdown in-between!) so as to give you a very clear idea of what to expect, and why the company stood out for me.
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My experiences of what you can expect before, during and after going through the Scott Logic Graduate Programme, and how onboarding worked during Lockdown.
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Resilience is the ability to adapt or recover from a range of issues, including trauma, burnout, and conflict. We do not always get to choose the situations we find ourselves in, but typically we get to choose what our response to those situations might be.
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If you're hiring developers you're always going to need a technical interview as part of the process. This post discusses what you should look for in this interview to find the best applicants.
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International Women's Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Here's a roundup of some of the things we’ve been doing across the company to celebrate.
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Find out how Adam McDevitt found his time during the summer internship in our Edinburgh office, working on the 'Looking at you' project.
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From his internship at Scott Logic, Harry was particularly keen to expand his skills and knowledge around web applications, and also get a real taste of what it’s like to build software for complex and demanding clients.
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At first, Isabelle Atkins was hesitant about applying for a summer internship at Scott Logic, assuming it would require more computational knowledge than she had – but she was pleasantly surprised.
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In this blog, we will introduce four of our new graduate colleagues as they share their experiences of their route into Scott Logic and how Grad Week has gone.
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The summer 2019 intern developers at the Edinburgh office created a web-based art installation that makes use of computer vision. This post describes our application and what you can expect from an internship at Scott Logic.
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Three years after graduating and joining Scott Logic as a consultant, I was recently promoted to the position of Senior Developer. It can be challenging to find the right second job after leaving university; in Scott Logic, I found myself in the perfect environment to reach that particular milestone within the company. I wanted to share my experiences through this blog post.
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Jerome wanted an internship that would allow him to work on big, challenging projects and get on with real development work – at Scott Logic, he got what he wished for!
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Tilly wanted her internship to be at a consultancy firm, allowing her to get some experience working in a real-world environment as part of a team. From Scott Logic, she learnt how important a good working culture is too.
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Find out how Sibela Chinareva found her time during the summer internship in our Bristol office, and the importance of clear communication.
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This year marked the kick-off of Scott Logic’s involvement in LGBTQ+ Pride Month activities around the company, involving people in activities and events that educated, stimulated conversations and raised £850.00 for local LGBTQ+ charities.
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Looking back on the questions I had when I was just starting out, I wanted to share my thoughts and advice to anyone interested in getting into software development.
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Gist of talks I loved while attending Women of Silicon Roundabout. The talks were a great mix on Diversity and Inclusion, Championing women, Technology and Motivation.
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This is the summary of BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2019 that I attended. I had a chance to attend interesting talks and to talk with women students who attended the event and were interested in ScottLogic.
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It can be hard to be a minority in any environment, which is the case for women in the software industry. At the Scott Logic Edinburgh office we’re in the great position to be able to host tech groups, and we’re keen to support women in the tech industry.
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As we become increasingly technical as testers we run the risk of joining an engineering monoculture. Diversity of thought and people within teams can help to address that and allow us to improve quality.
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Earning a PhD takes hard work, intelligence and a bunch of other skills. In this post I expand on how I left academia after qualifying and was made to feel like my qualification was truly valued at Scott Logic.
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What can testing offer you, and what can you offer it? Here's what I have found out about testing as a graduate from a non-computing degree.
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Scott Logic is a leading software consultancy company who offer three graduate schemes, one for development, testing, and user experience (UX). In this article I will give a personal account of the start of my graduate programme as a developer, along with inputs from my fellow starters. If you’re thinking about joining Scott Logic, want to find out more about their graduate scheme, or who they are, then this article is for you.
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A common misconception is that accessibility is for users that are deemed ‘disabled’ in modern society. This blog explores what 'accessibility' really is and how we can develop with it in mind.
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For our 12-week summer internship, Paulius Pocius and I were tasked with making the foyer screen responsive and customisable, with a view to eventually having it installed locally on all office desktops.
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Thinking of applying to be a Scott Logic intern? In this blog post I give a retrospective on the role, from the initial application, through to the prospective job offer.
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When my off-spring were younger and needed me more, I struggled to find the time to learn, I struggled to work out what to learn and I struggled with how to break it down to make it manageable. This is the article I wish I had been able to find and read all those years ago for anyone going through that frustration today.
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The four most helpful tips for getting a job offer from a careers fair based on my successful experience at the SiliconMilkRoundabout event last year.
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I will consider behaviours and characteristics that are sometimes under appreciated when defining what a good, or even great tester looks like.
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The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium is an annual one day event for students of Computing and related subjects, students have the chance to talk to companies offering career opportunities.
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This blog is based on my experience as a tester and how I got into testing. Furthermore, the blog explains my time at Scott Logic so far.
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A call to arms for better representation of women at tech conferences, followed by some practical tips for first-time speakers.
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The Newcastle graduates were given the task of creating a stock watchlist application that allowed users to track the prices of various stocks. This post describes the project and offers some thoughts into how it went.
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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.
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As the Edinburgh 2017 Summer Interns, Arran Rashid and I have spent twelve weeks working on a new foyer screen for the Scott Logic offices, this post describes the project and our time at Scott Logic.
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This blog post, written by a graduate developer joining the Edinburgh team, reflects on his induction week experience at Newcastle. A total of sixteen graduates across UX, development, and testing joined this August, and the induction was an ideal opportunity for everyone to meet.
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Lead Developer Bartosz discusses the differences between working for a company that provides in-house development and working as a Scott Logic consultant
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It’s an exciting time to work in UK tech, with companies growing each year. But there's something of an elephant in the room - the lack of women entering STEM
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We're hosting a Bugathon on 18th March in partnership with Newcastle University, find out about how we created it and what to expect on the day.
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Lead Test Engineer Daniel recently produced a blog tackling the myths around software testing, one of which being ‘testing is boring’. In this post, fellow Test Engineer Hannah delves a little deeper into this misconception and things we can do to dispel it.
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This year we welcomed seven interns to our offices. In this blog post we explore the projects they worked on over their time here.
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Continuous learning is part of our culture at Scott Logic, our test engineer Hannah volunteers as a STEM Ambassador in local schools. Find out more here.
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Last week, five Scott Logic staff took time out of the Edinburgh office to lend a hand with the Prewired Summer Hack for young people aged eight to 19.
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Last week was a busy week for our second lot of 2016 graduates as they embarked on their first week at Scott Logic - read on to find out what they got up to.
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In this post, Richard and Andy will talk you through their ‘Hell Escape’ game project, one of the things they’ve worked on during their first few months working at Scott Logic as graduate developers.
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A first-timer at the annual BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but was keen to answer any questions about careers in software.
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Nic Hemley, Head of Development for Scott Logic in Bristol, co-founded the Bristech meetup in July 2013, inspired by an existing group in Edinburgh. In this series of blog posts, Nic will be telling the story of this meetup: its genesis, challenges and possible future direction.
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Business must attract broader people into software and ensure the gender-based conditioning that has resulted in a male industry is confined to history.
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A glimpse into working life for new software developers and testers in the first few weeks of Scott Logic's graduate programme.
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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.
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A record 19 new recruits joined our 2015 graduate programme which began with an intense and enjoyable week involving technology, tiaras and table football.
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Murray Crease attends the inaugural PhD Horizons conference at the University of Edinburgh and discusses the breadth of career opportunities open to PhD graduates.
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Scott Logic have been helping out with a Code Club at a local primary school. As one of the developers involved, I'd like to share my experiences and tips for running your own Code Club!
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Last Thursday night saw a tense battle for the podium at the inaugural Scott Logic Newcastle grand prix. The race was held south of the river at Karting North East in Sunderland, but most people didn't let that, or the afternoon of torrential rain put them off!
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The inaugural Scott Logic pool competition took place last night, kicking off with 12 brave entrants comprising 6 developers, 5 new graduates and our intern Dean. It was a marathon session in a league format; a total of 66 games played across 4 tables in 3 hours.