Scott Logic / Altogether Smarter

Blog

Colin Eberhardt

I am CTO at Scott Logic and am a prolific technical author, blogger and speaker on a range of technologies.

My blog includes posts on a wide range of topics, including WebAssembly, HTML5 / JavaScript and data visualisation with D3 and d3fc. You'll also find a whole host of posts about previous technology interests including iOS, Swift, WPF and Silverlight.

I'm board member of FINOS, which is encouraging open source collaboration in the financial sector. I'm also very active on GitHub, contributing to a number of different projects.

Back to all posts
Artificial Intelligence

If software development were a race, AI wins every time

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.
Colin Eberhardt, Paul Graham, Lisa Perrett, Yotaka Blowers · 18th  Dec 2023 · 15 min read
Podcast

Beyond the Hype: Is generative AI coming for programming jobs?

In this episode, I'm joined by colleagues Oliver Cronk, Chris Price and James Heward for a lively debate on whether the latest advances in generative AI are going to threaten our jobs – are we going to be made redundant by our own creation?
Colin Eberhardt · 2nd  May 2023 · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: Can we do better than 'carbon aware' computing?
In this episode, Oliver Cronk and David Rees from Scott Logic are joined by Hannah Smith, Director of Operations at Green Web Foundation, to explore the potential benefits and limitations of ‘carbon aware’ computing. With global emissions from cloud computing exceeding those from commercial flights, is 'carbon aware' a distraction from getting to grips with the scale of the challenge we face?
Colin Eberhardt, Oliver Cronk, David Rees · 3rd  Jun · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: UK GOV AI – Is innovation guided by principles enough?
In this episode, I'm joined by Jess McEvoy and Peter Chamberlin for a discussion about the UK government’s approach to addressing AI challenges with its pro-innovation mantra, and whether this creates the right environment for success.
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  May · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: Are Data Mesh and Data Fabric just Marchitecture?
In this episode, Oliver Cronk, Andrew Carr and David Hope talk about the ever-changing world of data, with conversations moving from data warehouse to data lake, and data mesh to data fabric. They discuss the importance of data ownership and common tooling, and their view that data mesh is an approach rather than an architecture.
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Apr · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: Can technology sustainability really make a difference?
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.
Colin Eberhardt, Oliver Cronk, Katie Davis · 19th  Feb · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: Was the threat the CRA seemed to pose to open source just hype?
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Jan · 1 min read
Artificial Intelligence
If software development were a race, AI wins every time
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.
Colin Eberhardt, Paul Graham, Lisa Perrett, Yotaka Blowers · 18th  Dec 2023 · 15 min read
Tech
The State of WebAssembly 2023
This blog posts shares the results of the third annual State of WebAssembly survey, where we found that Rust and JavaScript usage continues to increase, but there is a growing desire for Zig and Kotlin. The use of wasm as a plugin environment continues to climb, with developers hoping it will deliver of the “write once and run anywhere” promise.
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Oct 2023 · 6 min read
Tech
LF Europe Summit Journal - Day Three
This year I’m attending the Linux Foundation Europe Summit, a sizable event bringing together 1,000s of people involved in open source. Day three made us think about allyship, yet more AI and the looming shadow of the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Sep 2023 · 3 min read
Tech
LF Europe Summit Journal - Day Two
This year I’m attending the Linux Foundation Europe Summit, a sizable event bringing together 1,000s of people involved in open source. Day two was packed with surveys, statistics and the fragility of the node ecosystem..
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Sep 2023 · 3 min read
Tech
LF Europe Summit Journal - Day One
This year I’m attending the Linux Foundation Europe Summit, a sizable event bringing together 1,000s of people involved in open source. I typically take extensive notes of the sessions I attend, so thought I’d share them here on our blog.
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Sep 2023 · 5 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: DevSecOps, a portmanteau too far?
In this episode, Oliver and Peter from Scott Logic are joined by Laura Bell Main, CEO and co-founder of SafeStack, for a lively discussion on DevSecOps. They touch on techniques such as “assume breach” and “shift left”, and the relationship to DevOps, which is trying to solve a similar problem.
Colin Eberhardt, Oliver Cronk · 4th  Sep 2023 · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: WebAssembly – from the browser to beyond
In this episode, I'm joined by Bailey Hayes from Cosmonic and Sean Isom from Adobe to go beyond the hype with WebAssembly. We start by discussing the early days of WebAssembly, and where it all began, in the browser. We debate the infamous tweet that compares WebAssembly to Docker, and look at the future promise of the Component Model, which aims to break down language barriers.
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Aug 2023 · 1 min read
Artificial Intelligence
A guide to Generative AI terminology
Generative AI is moving at an incredible pace, bringing with it a whole new raft of terminology. With articles packed full of terms like prompt injection, embeddings and funky acronyms like LoRA, it can be a little hard to keep pace. For a while now I've been keeping a notebook where I record brief definitions of these new terms as I encounter them. I find it such a useful reference, I thought I'd share it in this blog post.
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  Jun 2023 · 7 min read
Artificial Intelligence
Re-implementing LangChain in 100 lines of code
LangChain has become a tremendously popular toolkit for building a wide range of LLM-powered applications, including chat, Q&A and document search. In this blogpost I re-implement some of the novel LangChain functionality as a learning exercise, looking at the low-level prompts it uses to create these higher level capabilities.
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  May 2023 · 13 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: Is generative AI coming for programming jobs?
In this episode, I'm joined by colleagues Oliver Cronk, Chris Price and James Heward for a lively debate on whether the latest advances in generative AI are going to threaten our jobs – are we going to be made redundant by our own creation?
Colin Eberhardt · 2nd  May 2023 · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: Y2Q – The end of encryption as we know it?
In this episode – the second of a two-parter – we talk to Denis Mandich, CTO of Qrypt, about the growing threat that Quantum Computers will ultimately render our current cryptographic techniques useless – an event dubbed ‘Y2Q’, in a nod to the Y2K issue we faced over twenty years ago.
Colin Eberhardt · 3rd  Apr 2023 · 1 min read
Artificial Intelligence
AI is morphing from tool to platform (and the next technology epoch begins)
The buzz and excitement around generative AI is continuing to grow as their capabilities rapidly expand. However, their ability to generate content is just the starting point. From my perspective, the emergent reasoning capability, coupled with their intelligent use of tools, is what will make this technology truly transformational, and will mark the start of a new technology epoch.
Colin Eberhardt · 31st  Mar 2023 · 5 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: Quantum Computing – hype and not hype simultaneously?
In this episode, we talk about Quantum Computing with Denis Mandich, CTO of Qrypt. As well as discussing quantum physics, we cover the practical aspects of cloud-based Quantum Computers and what can be achieved today through circuit design. Finally, we look to the future to discuss the impact this breakthrough technology is likely to have.
Colin Eberhardt · 13th  Mar 2023 · 1 min read
Tech · Video
Could the Public Sector Solve the OSS Sustainability Challenges?
The rapid rise in the consumption or usage of open source hasn’t been met with an equal rise in contribution – to put it simply, there are far more takers than givers, and the challenges created by this imbalance are starting to emerge.
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Feb 2023
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: ChatGPT and why it has set the internet alight
In this episode, I'm joined by my colleague, Oliver Cronk, and Chris Booth from NatWest for a lively discussion about the much-hyped ChatGPT – covering its origins and recent advances, the new discipline of prompt engineering, and some practical applications and limitations of this technology.
Colin Eberhardt · 6th  Feb 2023 · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: Blockchain is dead, long live blockchain
In this episode, I’m joined by colleagues Oliver Cronk, Peter Chamberlin and Chris Price for a lively discussion about blockchain, including the mechanics of bitcoin, the proof of work consensus, and technologies which are blockchain-like, but prefer not to use that term. Finally, we ask ourselves the question, is blockchain just hype?
Colin Eberhardt, Oliver Cronk, Chris Price · 15th  Dec 2022 · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: Is the Metaverse built on foundations of hype?
In this episode Colin, Ollie, Johanna and Lily hold a lively conversation that dives into Web3 and the Metaverse. We ask the question “what is Web3.0”, and explore what it means to be a decentralised technology. We discuss the Metaverse, Roblox and other virtual environments, and very briefly touch on NFTs. But for the most part, we talk about exploration and innovation.
Colin Eberhardt, Oliver Cronk · 7th  Nov 2022 · 1 min read
Tech · Video
The State of Open Source in Finance - Keynote Panel
FINOS, in partnership with Linux Foundation Research, GitHub, Red Hat, Scott Logic, and with the support of many other FINOS members, conducted the second annual study to assess the opportunities and potential challenges of consuming, contributing to, and governing open source in financial services. This panel dives into the research's key findings, as well as provides insight into how things have progressed year-over-year.
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  Nov 2022
Tech
Can Web3 beat public cloud?
There are a growing number of voices heralding Web3 as the future of the internet, and this technology (concept?) is receiving considerable coverage at conferences, in the technology press, and internet forums. I decided it was time to put Web3 to the test and see how it fares against the contemporary approach to building apps - the public cloud. Unfortunately I found Web3 to be very lacking.
Colin Eberhardt · 31st  Oct 2022 · 16 min read
Tech · Video
Evaluating Workflow Technology
A panel discussion from FinJS London 2022, exploring the latest developments in desktop workflows
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  Oct 2022
Podcast
Beyond the Hype: Most-loved language – does Rust justify the hype?
In this episode, Simon Martin, Chris Price and Rob Pilling share their interest and insights into Rust. This relatively new programming language has caught the attention of the development community, being voted the ‘most-loved’ language seven years in a row in the StackOverflow survey.
Colin Eberhardt, Chris Price, Simon Martin, Rob Pilling · 1st  Aug 2022 · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype - Investing in Innovation and avoiding the Hype in Digital Government
In this month’s episode, we tackle a wide range of topics relating to the role of technology innovation, and the perils of hyped technology, within Digital Government.
Colin Eberhardt, Jessica McEvoy, Alex Segrove · 8th  Jul 2022 · 1 min read
Tech
The State of WebAssembly 2022
WebAssembly has gone through quite a transformation this last year, while the wasm language landscape is slowly shifting, the more notable change is in what people are using WebAssembly for. The use of wasm for serverless, containerisation and as a plug-in technology has leapt considerably, with WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) becoming ever more important.
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Jun 2022 · 4 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype - Behaviour Driven Development, Hype? Or just misunderstood?
In this month’s episode we talk about Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), a testing practice where system behaviours are captured in a human readable Domain Specific Language (DSL), which are automated and executed.
Colin Eberhardt, Daniel McNamee, Xin Chen, Jack Arnstein · 15th  Jun 2022 · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype - Is multi-cloud a myth?
In this month’s episode, we talk multi-cloud. This is a challenging topic, even the first step—nailing down what the term actually means—isn’t easy. How does it differ from hybrid-cloud or poly-cloud? Does the term refer to the deployment approach for a single application or an entire organisation?
Colin Eberhardt, James Heward, Robert Griffiths · 3rd  May 2022 · 1 min read
Tech
Building a WebAssembly-powered serverless platform
WebAssembly is really starting to shine is as a standalone runtime environment. In this blog post I explore the Wasmtime WebAssembly runtime, and build a WebAssembly-powered serverless platform in just 70 lines of code.
Colin Eberhardt · 16th  Apr 2022 · 11 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype - Do you actually need a microfrontend?
A relatively new architectural style for building web-based applications, micro-frontends are an extension of the popular microservices pattern where the vertical slice of functionality that a microservice provides is extended all the way to the front-end. With micro-frontends, you can more easily scale your development teams by composing applications from loosely coupled frontend components. In this podcast we ask the question 'Do you actually need a micro-frontend?'
Colin Eberhardt, Sam Hogarth, Dean Kerr · 5th  Apr 2022 · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype - Microservices: are they the only architecture you need?
Microservices have become the standard architectural pattern for everything. It’s a great and versatile pattern, but what people rarely talk about is the cost. You didn’t think you got all that good stuff (polyglot, scalable, decoupled...) for free, did you? In this episode, we talk about the real-world impact of choosing this pattern and when it might not be the right choice.
Colin Eberhardt, Ian Sugar, Harry Bellamy · 8th  Mar 2022 · 1 min read
Podcast
Beyond the Hype - Coming soon from Scott Logic
Beyond the Hype is a brand new monthly podcast from the Scott Logic team, where we cast a practical eye over what is new and exciting in technology – everything from Kafka to Kubernetes, AI to APIs, microservices to micro-frontends. We look beyond the promises, the buzz and excitement to guide you towards the genuine value.
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Feb 2022 · 1 min read
Artificial Intelligence
Article recommendations and increasing engagement with OpenAI GPT-3 Embeddings
It is quite common for blogs, or news / content distribution websites, to organise their content around categories of tags. However, this approach is time-consuming, and from measuring behaviours, it doesn't seem to do much to encourage browsing. In this blog post I use the new OpenAI embedding API to create highly targeted article recommendations, resulting in a four-fold (x4) increase in engagement.
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Feb 2022 · 5 min read
Open Source
Open Source Sustainability through Corporate Social Responsibility
The recent Log4j vulnerability has once again sparked a lot of debate around our reliance on open source projects and their sustainability challenges. I argue that money cannot fix this issue, nor can hiding behind security scans, audits and other defenses. The solution is to genuinely understand the open source community, acknowledge the shared responsibility we have in our commons and through the well-understood tool of Corporate Social Responsibility, look to fill the ethical and philanthropic gaps.
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Dec 2021 · 6 min read
Artificial Intelligence
Creating personalised data stories with GPT-3
You can tell powerful stories with data, but so often we are faced with raw data (albeit beautifully presented), and are left to create our own narratives. My previous attempts at turning data into stories have been time consuming and underwhelming. In this post I demonstrate how GPT-3, a new and advanced language model, can construct engaging and unique stories from user-specific data, with relative ease.
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  Dec 2021 · 10 min read
Open Source
Open source in financial services, bridging the contribution gap
We recently worked on a research project, exploring open source issues and challenges within financial services organisations. We found that consumption is “acceptable” rather than “encouraged”, with security concerns representing the biggest obstacle. On the flip-side, open source maintainers don’t wish to invest further in security. Financial services organisations, whose contribution policies lag behind, need to bridge this gap in order to fully capitalise on the value open source presents.
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Oct 2021 · 4 min read
Open Source · Video
Open Source Sustainability through Corporate Social Responsibility
Modern software is increasingly complex, made up of hundreds or thousands of open source components, hidden away in deeply nested dependency trees. Just how much do we know about these components that are an integral part of our products? What are the risks associated with their usage, and our exposure?
Colin Eberhardt · 13th  Oct 2021
Tech
Exploring 120 years of timezones
Timezones, and daylight saving - the practice of moving clocks forward by one hour once a year - are a pain. They make it hard to schedule international meetings, plan travel, or may simply cause you to be an hour late for work once a year. For a developer, they are even worse! This blog post takes a visual journey through the last 120 years of timezones, daylight saving and the ever changing world time.
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Sep 2021 · 4 min read
Artificial Intelligence · Video
Copilot - Life with an AI-powered programming pair
Last month GitHub released Copilot, an AI powered tool that provides surprising accurate suggestions ranging from a few lines of code to entire functions. Copilot uses a vast and powerful AI model that is trained on billions of lines of open source code from GitHub. This, combined with the context provided by your code and comments, allows it to provide amazingly accurate suggestions. This is no simple autocomplete, this is pair programming with a robot!
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  Aug 2021
Artificial Intelligence
GitHub Copilot Experiences - a glimpse of an AI-assisted future
I've been lucky enough to be granted access to the preview of Copilot, GitHub's new 'AI pair programmer' that is causing quite a stir. This blog post shares my initial thoughts and experiences with this tool. In brief, I'm stunned by its capabilities. It has genuinely made me say 'wow' out loud a few times in the past few hours, not something you expect from your developer tooling.
Colin Eberhardt · 3rd  Jul 2021 · 6 min read
Tech
The State of WebAssembly 2021
This blog post shares the results of the first State of WebAssembly Survey, with results from 250 respondents surveyed in June 2021. We find that Rust is the most frequently used and most desired WebAssembly language and many other interesting results
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Jun 2021 · 5 min read
Tech
You probably don’t need a micro-frontend
Micro-frontends is a relatively new architectural style for building web-based applications, which as the name suggests, is an extension of the popular microservices pattern. In this blog post I argue that this is a pattern you might not need!
Colin Eberhardt · 17th  Feb 2021 · 6 min read
Open Source
What the financial crash can teach us about open source
A talk I gave at the virtual Open Source Strategy Forum conference in 2020, where I compared some of the challenges facing open source (complexity, fragility, sustainability) to those which triggered the financial crisis of 2008.
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Dec 2020 · 12 min read
Tech · Video
What the financial crash can teach us about open source?
A talk, from the Open Source Strategy Forums, where I compared some of the challenges facing open source (complexity, fragility, sustainability) to those which triggered the financial crisis of 2008.
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Dec 2020
Tech
In-browser transcoding of video files with FFmpeg and WebAssembly
The WebAssembly build of FFmpeg allows you to run this powerful video processing tool directly within the browser. In this blog post I explore FFmpeg.wasm and create a simple client-side transcoder that streams data into a video element, with a bit of RxJS thrown in for good measure.
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Nov 2020 · 8 min read
Tech
Code generating a WebAssembly 6502 emulator from specifications
Writing emulators that bring old computer hardware back to life is a popular hobby, and one that I have been enjoying recently through my own goal of writing an Atari 2600 emulator. However, writing a CPU emulator can get a little repetitive and tedious, so I thought I'd explore a different approach - generating the CPU emulation code from a specification rather than manually translating it. This blog post shares the fruitful results.
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Aug 2020 · 9 min read
Resources
White Paper: Building an integrated desktop application ecosystem
This white paper identifies the core building blocks that are required to build an integrated desktop application ecosystem using a combination of web and legacy technologies, looks at the associated challenges, and reviews the various open source and commercial products that form the foundations of this ecosystem of the future.
Colin Eberhardt · 13th  Aug 2020 · 1 min read
Tech · Video
The new normal for your desktop
This webinar explores the potential and realities of an emerging vision for a more integrated desktop application ecosystem, as facilitated by various open-source and vendor products.
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Jun 2020
Tech · Video
A gentle introduction to WebAssembly
WebAssembly is a brand new W3C standard for a secure and load-time optimised, stack-based virtual machine that is a compilation target for a broad range of languages. That's clear isn't it?! This talk will provide a very gentle introduction to WebAssembly, with practical examples. By the end of the talk you'll have a much better understanding of this exciting new technology.
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Jun 2020
Tech
Rendering One Million Datapoints with D3 and WebGL
This blog post introduces the WebGL components which we recently added to D3FC, this suite of components make it easy to render charts with very large numbers of datapoints using D3. Throughout this post I'll describe the creation of the following visualisation, which displays 1 million books from the Hathi Trust library
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  May 2020 · 15 min read
Tech
A WebAssembly Powered Augmented Reality Sudoku Solver
An Augmented Reality Sudoku solver using the WebAssembly build of OpenCV (a C++ computer vision library), Tensorflow (a machine learning library) and solver written in Rust. It neatly demonstrates how WebAssembly allows you to write performance-critical web-based applications in a wide range of languages.
Colin Eberhardt · 3rd  Jan 2020 · 13 min read
Tech
WebAssembly 2019 Year In Review
I've been authoring the WebAssembly Weekly newsletter for just over two years now. As we near the end of 2019 I want to take the opportunity to share some of my favourite articles from the year.
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Dec 2019 · 4 min read
Tech
WebAssembly on the Blockchain and JavaScript Smart Contracts
WebAssembly, despite the name, is a universal runtime that is finding traction on a number of platforms beyond the web. In this blog post I explore just one example, the use of WebAssembly as a smart contract engine on the blockchain. This post looks at the creation of a simple meetup-style event with ticket allocation governed by a smart contract written in JavaScript.
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Nov 2019 · 11 min read
Tech
Faster Fractals with Multi-Threaded WebAssembly
When WebAssembly was released a couple of years ago it was an MVP (Minimal Viable Product), one significant feature that was missing from the MVP was threads. The WebAssembly threads proposal is now quite mature and available in both the tooling and Chrome. This blog post explores the internals of this feature, the new instruction set, and how it supports multi-threaded applications.
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Jul 2019 · 13 min read
Tech
Build your own WebAssembly Compiler
Have you ever wanted to write your own compiler? ... yes? ... of course you have! I've always wanted to have a go at writing a compiler, and with the recent release of WebAssembly, I had the perfect excuse to have a go.
Colin Eberhardt · 17th  May 2019 · 20 min read
Tech
Building a better D3 axis
Recently we've been looking at enhancing the D3 axis component to implement a number of common features including more flexible label placement (e.g. positioning labels between ticks) and rotation / offset of labels to avoid collisions. This blog post demonstrates some of these features and how they were implemented.
Andy Lee, Colin Eberhardt · 9th  May 2019 · 6 min read
Tech · Video
Build Your Own WebAssembly Compiler - London Node User Group - April 2019
This talk, from London Node User Group, looked at some of the internals of WebAssembly, exploring how it works ‘under the hood’ with a demonstration of how you can create your own (simple) compiler that targets this runtime.
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Apr 2019
Resources
White Paper: Thinking differently - the cloud as a value driver
The Financial Services industry is having to change and adapt in the face of regulations, competition, changes in buying habits and client expectations. This white paper encourages the industry to look at public cloud not as a tool for driving down costs, but as a vehicle for technical and business agility.
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Apr 2019 · 1 min read
Cloud
Maintaining global state in AWS Lambda functions with Async Hooks
This post looks at how the experimental Async Hooks API can be used to support global state within AWS Lambda functions. Considering that this is an experimental API it's worth treating with caution, but it does provide an interesting potential solution to a common problem.
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Mar 2019 · 9 min read
Tech · Video
Tools, Bots and Automation for better Open Source Projects
With open source projects, we often work with strangers, people we may never speak to, let alone meet. Creating a quality product, with such a disparate team can be quite a challenge. This talk takes a look at how tools and automation are a critical component when creating a successful open source project.
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Dec 2018
Tech
OpenFin Layouts added to StockFlux
We've updated StockFlux, our OpenFin demo app, to make use of the recently-released OpenFin Layouts APIs. This blog post takes a quick look at the features we've added, and the APIs used.
Colin Eberhardt, Marzio Superina · 3rd  Dec 2018 · 2 min read
Tech
Realtime crypto charting with JPM Perspective and d3fc
Perspective is a streaming pivot visualization engine which uses WebAssembly. This blog post explores its capabilities and creates a custom cryptocurrency visualisation using d3fc.
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Nov 2018 · 6 min read
Open Source
7 Reasons I ❤️ Open Source
Here's why I spend so much of my time—including evenings and weekends—on GitHub, as an active member of the open source community.
Colin Eberhardt · 9th  Nov 2018 · 1 min read
Cloud
Serverless Rust with AWS Lambda and WebAssembly
In this post, I look at how WebAssembly can be used to create serverless functions and demonstrate an AWS Lambda function written entirely in Rust.
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Oct 2018 · 5 min read
Tech
Building a Complex Financial Chart with D3 and d3fc
When it comes to creating complex bespoke charts, of all the JavaScript visualisation / charting frameworks, D3 is the clear winner. This blog post takes a step-by-step look at the process of of building an ‘advanced’ financial charting using D3, with additional components from d3fc.
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Sep 2018 · 16 min read
Tech
The future of WebAssembly - A look at upcoming features and proposals
WebAssembly is a performance optimised virtual machine that was shipped in all four major browsers earlier this year. It is a nascent technology and the current version is very much an MVP. This blog post takes a look at the WebAssembly roadmap and the features it might gain in the near future.
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Jul 2018 · 10 min read
Cloud
Sleeping Lambdas and AWS Step Functions
With AWS Lambda you pay for execution duration, which means that sleeping or waiting during execution has a direct impact on your bill! This blog post takes a look at how to make AWS Lambda functions sleep, without incurring costs, via AWS Step Functions.
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Jun 2018 · 9 min read
Tech
Transpiling WebAssembly to support Multi Return Values
The WebAssembly specification is evolving, with many new features on the way. This blog post makes one of these future features available today, multi value returns, using the Babel approach of transpiling.
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  May 2018 · 10 min read
Tech
Writing WebAssembly By Hand
WebAssembly is a new language for the web, although unlike JavaScript it's not a language you are expected to use directly. However, it is actually possible to write WebAssembly directly by hand and it turns out this is an educational and enjoyable process, which I will explore in this blog post.
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Apr 2018 · 13 min read
Resources
White Paper: The Web Assembles
WebAssembly is a new runtime for the web; a fast and efficient compilation target for a wide range of languages that could have a far-reaching impact on the web as we know it. This paper looks at at the performance limits of JavaScript and how WebAssembly was designed to tackle them.
Colin Eberhardt, Chris Price · 24th  Apr 2018 · 1 min read
Tech · Video
WebAssembly - and the Death of JavaScript?
This talk, from JSMonthly, looked at what's wrong with the way we are using JavaScript today and why we need WebAssembly.
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Feb 2018
Tech
Writing a CHIP-8 emulator with Rust and WebAssembly
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!
Colin Eberhardt · 13th  Dec 2017 · 12 min read
Open Source
Developing Bristol Pound - An Open Source React Native App
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.
Colin Eberhardt, Georgiana Ginghina, Chris Meehan · 22nd  Nov 2017 · 9 min read
Tech
Migrating D3 Force Layout to WebAssembly
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).
Colin Eberhardt · 30th  Oct 2017 · 12 min read
Tech · Video
Serverless JavaScript
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Oct 2017
Tech
Exploring different approaches to building WebAssembly modules
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 17th  Oct 2017 · 10 min read
Tech
Asynchronous Recursion with Callbacks, Promises and Async.
Creating asynchronous functions that are recursive can be a bit of a challenge. This blog post takes a look at various different approaches, including callbacks and promises, and ultimately demonstrates how async functions result in a much simpler and cleaner solution.
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Sep 2017 · 11 min read
Tech
Creating a Market Profile Chart with D3
Market profile charts are relatively complicated and specialised charts used by financial traders. This blog post looks at how to render a market profile chart using D3.
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Aug 2017 · 8 min read
Open Source
cla-bot a GitHub bot for automating Contributor Licence Agreements
A few months ago we contributed a project, ContainerJS, to the Symphony Software Foundation, an organization that fosters open source and collaboration within financial services.
Colin Eberhardt · 16th  Jul 2017 · 2 min read
Tech
Mapping UK place name endings (With command line cartography tools)
Place names in UK and Ireland are very much influenced by their surroundings, with endings such as -hill, -ford, and -wood quite clearly referencing local geography. This blog post uses the new NDJSON command line tools for processing, transforming and joining datasets to create an optimised visualisation.
Colin Eberhardt · 25th  Jun 2017 · 8 min read
Cloud
gifbot - Building a GitHub App
This post takes a look at the recently launched GitHub App platform, that allows developers to create integrations and services which can be shared with others. The post describes the development of gifbot, a simple and fun App!
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  May 2017 · 8 min read
Cloud
Developing a GitHub Bot with AWS Lambda
This blog post describes the process of creating a GitHub bot, hosted as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda function, that performs various checks on pull requests.
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  May 2017 · 15 min read
Tech
Interactive and Responsive Small Multiples with D3
Small multiples repeat the same basic chart, typically with the same axes, to display different slices of a dataset. They are an excellent way of showing rich multi-dimensional data, without becoming a dense mess of lines. This post looks at how to implement small multiples with D3 and d3fc.
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Apr 2017 · 11 min read
Tech
Visualising London Marathon Training Data From Strava
I downloaded an analysed the training data for 1,000 athlete who ran the London Marathon in 2016. From this data I've learnt that people put in ~30% less mileage than popular plans suggest, Sunday mornings are a firm favourite for long runs, and that Saturday morning parkruns are very popular!
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Feb 2017 · 4 min read
Tech
Visualising London Marathon Strava Data
I recently downloaded run data for the 7,190 athletes who recorded their London Marathon on Strava, a popular platform for runners and cyclists. This blog post visualises and analyses the data in various interesting ways.
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Jan 2017 · 4 min read
Tech
Our most popular Tech Blog posts of 2016
OK, I’m a bit late; I intended this for the start of January, but this time last year I wrote a post on our most popular 2015 technical blogs. Here I am again!
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Jan 2017 · 1 min read
Tech
Semantic Versioning is not enough
A few days ago the roadmap for future Angular releases, starting with v.4 in March 2017, was unveiled. It once again made me re-visit my personal doubts about semantic versioning, the underlying issue being that it is great for computers, but bad for humans. Considering that people are the primary consumers of your libraries and frameworks this can’t be right? Perhaps a hybrid approach that combines both semantic and romantic versioning would keep both the computers and the humans happy?
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Dec 2016 · 5 min read
Tech
A Journey Through Sound Synthesis with AudioKit
For the past four years I've been an author on Ray Wenderlich's website which provides tutorials for iOS developers. I don't do much native iOS development these days, However, I do like to keep my skills up to date. As part of this team I sometimes find myself being assigned topics that I wouldn't otherwise look into. And so it was, a couple of months ago, that I received an assignment to write a tutorial on the open source AudioKit project.
Colin Eberhardt · 30th  Nov 2016 · 1 min read
Resources
White Paper: Unstoppable HTML5
A white paper which takes a looks at the continued growth of HTML5 and how it is now a viable solution for desktop application development.
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Oct 2016 · 1 min read
Tech · Video
Time Travel and The Future of HTML5 Productivity
In this talk I'll review how the functional programming style of frameworks such as React, ImmutableJS and Redux have paved the way for novel techniques that once again support rapid development cycles
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Jul 2016
Tech
Recursive Pattern Matching and Transformation of JavaScript AST
I've recently been playing around with the JavaScript Abstract Syntax Trees (AST), with the aim of transforming some JavaScript code into various other languages (Java, C#, Objective-C). As part of my research, I looked at how Babel performs AST transforms. If you're not familiar with Babel, and the plugins which perform the transformations, I'd recommend this blog post by Shuhei Kagawa that describes the development of a simple plugin for Angular 2 code generation.
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Jun 2016 · 10 min read
Tech
Six tips for cleaner javascript promises
This blog post shares a few quick tips and patterns that I've been using to structure JavaScript promises; keeping them clean, simple and readable.
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Jun 2016 · 12 min read
Tech
Applying redux reducers to arrays
The redux pattern provides a simple (and strict) pattern for managing state; a single store holds the state while a reducer applies actions, evolving the application state.
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  May 2016 · 9 min read
Tech
Automating Expenses With the Mondo API
Mondo Bank has recently moved into public Beta, sending out 1,000 cards to trial customers each week. I received my Beta card a few days ago, and have been using it ever since. This blog post takes a quick look at the Mondo API and how I used it to automate expense claims!
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Mar 2016 · 7 min read
Tech
Binding with Bond
Swift Bond is a binding framework that removes the mundane task of wiring up your UI. In this tutorial, which was originally published on Ray Wenderlich's website, I introduce the concepts of Bond and demonstrate how to use it to rapidly build an iOS app.
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Feb 2016 · 1 min read
Tech
Angular 2 Time Travel with Redux
This post looks at integrating Angular 2 with Immutable.js and Redux, a popular Flux store implementation. It also demonstrates that the functional approach, encouraged by these technologies, allow for powerful concepts such as time travel, where you can replay actions and application state.
Colin Eberhardt · 25th  Jan 2016 · 11 min read
Tech
Angular 2 with Immutable.JS
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Jan 2016 · 8 min read
Tech
Most popular Tech Blog posts of 2015
Most popular tech blog posts of 2015
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Jan 2016 · 1 min read
Tech
Creating an Angular 2 build with Gulp, TSLint and DefinitelyTyped
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Dec 2015 · 15 min read
Tech
Building a todo list application with Angular 2.0
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Dec 2015 · 16 min read
Tech
Rendering ASCII Charts with D3
A few days ago Bloomberg published their list of 50 companies to watch in 2016, and for some reason they decided to publish the entire report in ASCII! I thought it would be a bit of fun to see if I could use D3 to create my own ASCI charts
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Nov 2015 · 8 min read
Tech · Video
Geeking out about React Native
ReactJS, Virtual DOM, JSX, a hackable editor, ES6 modules, classes, arrow functions, node, iOS, native-UI, flexbox, idempotent functions… In this talk I’ll be geeking out about all the seriously cool tech that makes ReactNative possible.
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Oct 2015
Resources
White Paper: HTML5 Migration – Get started with a Little Bang
This white paper explores and addresses the importance of migrating complex business applications from Flex and Silverlight to HTML5. It highlights the risks involved in delaying your migration and provides a solution that tackles cost concerns at the same time as delivering an early return on investment.
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  Oct 2015 · 1 min read
Tech
Improving Grunt Performance
JavaScript builds are getting more complex and time consuming. This blog post shares a few steps I took to improve the performance of one of our project's grunt build, hopefully some of the tools I used will be of use to others.
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Oct 2015 · 6 min read
Tech
MVVM With ReactiveCocoa 3.0
This is my final article on ReactiveCocoa 3.0 (RAC3), where I demonstrate some more complex RAC3 usages within the context of an application built using the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern.
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  May 2015 · 8 min read
Resources
White Paper: Making Technology Disappear
Creating omni-channel experiences in enterprise is more often than not a challenge in terms of strategy and mindset rather than technology. This white paper outlines a twinned design and technical approach that ensures focus is squarely on users and the contexts within they use a system.
Graham Odds, Colin Eberhardt · 8th  May 2015 · 1 min read
Tech
ReactiveCocoa 3.0 - Signal Producers and API clarity
My previous blog post took a first look at ReactiveCocoa 3.0 (RC3), where I described the new Signal interface, and the pipe forward operator. In this blog post I continue my exploration of the RC3 APIs and turn my attention to signal producers. I also discuss a few points around the overall clarity of the new ReactiveCocoa APIs.
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Apr 2015 · 7 min read
Tech
A First Look at ReactiveCocoa 3.0
This blog post takes a look at the new ReactiveCocoa 3.0 swift interface, which introduces generics, a pipe-forward operator and an interesting use of curried functions.
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Apr 2015 · 7 min read
Tech
Retrospective on Developing an application with React Native
I've been building a React Native app for the past few months, which was published as a tutorial yesterday. A number of people have asked about my thoughts and opinions about React Native - which I am sharing in this blog post.
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Mar 2015 · 7 min read
Tech
Introducing React Native
A few months ago Facebook announced React Native, a framework that lets you build native iOS applications with JavaScript. I've been spending the past couple of months building am app with this framework, which I have finally been able to share!
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Mar 2015 · 1 min read
Tech
Implementing React.js in Swift
This blog post explores the novel approach taken by the React.js team, where the UI is expressed as a function of the current application state, and re-implements it with Swift.
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Mar 2015 · 12 min read
Tech
Exploring KVO alternatives with Swift
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  Feb 2015 · 8 min read
Tech
Implementing Events in Swift
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Feb 2015 · 6 min read
Tech
SVG layout with Flexbox for simpler D3 charts
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 2nd  Feb 2015 · 9 min read
Tech
Exception Handling in Swift
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Jan 2015 · 7 min read
Tech
Tearing Down Swift's Optional Pyramid of Doom
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.
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  Dec 2014 · 7 min read
Tech
Swift Initialization and the Pain of Optionals
Swift's strict initialisation process results in a number of practical issues, leaving developers scratching their heads. This post explores a few solutions including two-phase initialisation, the use of optionals and lazy properties.
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Nov 2014 · 5 min read
Tech
Binding mutable arrays with ReactiveCocoa
This post describes a binding helper that allows you to bind arrays directly to table views with ReactiveCocoa. In this update to my previous post, the helper is extended to support mutable arrays.
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Nov 2014 · 2 min read
Tech
Mandelbrot Generation With Concurrent Functional Swift
This post show how the simple task of computing a Mandelbrot set can be split up across multiple threads (and processors) using functional techniques.
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  Oct 2014 · 10 min read
Tech
Jekyll Pagination and Infinite Scroll
Recently I updated the Scott Logic blog to implement infinite scrolling using a combination of Jekyll pagination and jScroll. Both of these components are quite fussy about their respective configuration, meaning that integrating them took longer than expected. I thought I'd share my solution in this blog post, hopefully saving others from the hours I spent digging into jScroll code or cursing Jekyll!
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Oct 2014 · 4 min read
Tech
Swift and the curious case of AnyObject
Swift, as I am sure you are aware, is quite a strict, safe and strongly-typed language. However, because the language needs to maintain Objective-C compatibility it has some rather curious features, and the behaviour of `AnyObject` is one of them!
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Sep 2014 · 2 min read
Tech
Functional Swift and Memoization
This post is a continuation of my previous which looked at implementing Conway’s Game of Life using functional techniques. Here I look at how memoization can be used to cache the return value of a function in order to improve performance.
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Sep 2014 · 11 min read
Tech
Swift By Tutorials is Published
Apple released the first public beta of the Swift programming language just over three months ago. Within days of the release myself and Matt Galloway started working on our book Swift by Tutorials, which as of yesterday is finally finished and shipping!
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Sep 2014 · 1 min read
Tech
The Game of Life with Functional Swift
This blog post shows an implementation of Conway's Game of Life using functional techniques in Swift.
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Sep 2014 · 12 min read
Tech
Swift Adoption Statistics
It was just two months ago that Apple took us by surprise in releasing the Swift programming language. This blog post reflects on the first few months of Swift adoption.
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  Aug 2014 · 2 min read
Tech
MVVM, Swift and ReactiveCocoa - It's all good!
This blog post looks out how Swift makes the combination of ReactiveCocoa and MVVM even better ...
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Jul 2014 · 5 min read
Tech
A Statistical Comparison of the iOS and Android Stores
A few months ago I published a blog post which showed the results of analysing the meta-data of 75,000 apps from the iTunes App Store. This blog post continues the analysis by adding 60,000 Android apps into the mix.
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Jul 2014 · 1 min read
Tech
MVVM with ReactiveCocoa
I've recently had a two-part tutorial published on Ray Wenderlich's website that details how ReactiveCocoa can be used to implement the MVVM pattern within iOS applications.
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Jul 2014 · 1 min read
Tech
Swift Sequences and Lazy Evaluation
In this blog post I want to take a quick look at the Swift Sequence protocol, which forms the basis for the for-in loop, and see how this allows you to write code that performs sequence operations that are only evaluated on-demand.
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Jun 2014 · 7 min read
Resources
White Paper - HTML5 At Enterprise Scale
Moving from desktop or plugin technologies (Flex, Silverlight, Java Applets) to HTML5 is a challenge for developers of large-scale enterprise applications. This White Paper discusses the challenges and offers potential solutions.
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  May 2014 · 1 min read
Tech
Binding to a UITableView from a ReactiveCocoa ViewModel
This blog post presents a simple utility class for binding ReactiveCocoa ViewModels to UITableViews without the need for the usual datasource / delegate boiler-plate.
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  May 2014 · 9 min read
Tech
A Colour Analysis of the Apple App Store
This blog post presents the result of analysing 250,000 screenshots from the Apple App Store, looking at hue, lightness and saturation histograms for each category.
Colin Eberhardt · 12th  Apr 2014 · 8 min read
Tech
A Statistical Analysis of the Apple App Store
The App Store continues its rapid growth, with approximately 300,000 apps added each year. I decided it would be fun to download as much app metadata as possible in order to see what patterns and trends I could find. This blog post describes the results.
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Mar 2014 · 9 min read
Tech
Simulating Accelerometer and Location data for iOS
This blog post looks at how to simulate accelerometer and location data so that you can test iOS apps without the need for a physical device. The simulated data is provided by an interactive UI which allows you to rotate the phone and mark paths on a map which can then be replayed.
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Mar 2014 · 7 min read
Tech
ReactiveCocoa - The Definitive Guide
It feels like everyone in the iOS community is talking about ReactiveCocoa at the moment. In this blog post I talk briefly about what ReactiveCocoa is and the 'Definitive Guide' which I wrote for raywenderlich.com
Colin Eberhardt · 13th  Mar 2014 · 2 min read
Tech
PropertyCross 1.3 Released
PropertyCross has just announced a v1.3 release, which includes two new frameworks, a number of updates and an improved build system.
Colin Eberhardt · 31st  Jan 2014 · 2 min read
Tech
iOS 7 By Tutorials In Print
The book, iOS 7 By Tutorials, which I contributed four chapters to, is now in print.
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  Jan 2014 · 1 min read
Tech
Understanding JavaScript Object Creation Patterns
This article explores the various ways you can create objects with the JavaScript language, and through this exploration finds that there is much to learn about the language!
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Nov 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
An Interactive Tab Bar Controller Transition
This blog post looks at creating an interactive tab bar controller transition, where you can swipe left and right to navigate between the tabs. The transition itself is a 'paperfold' effect - very pretty!
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Sep 2013 · 9 min read
Tech
Creating a custom flip view controller transition
With iOS 7 Apple introduced a new set of APIs for creating custom View Controller transitions. In this blog post I look at how to create a custom 'flip' transition, giving the impression of a turning page.
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Sep 2013 · 8 min read
Tech
iOS 7 by Tutorials - the first iOS 7 book - is published
For the past four months I have been hard at work writing four chapters for a book, iOS 7 by tutorials. Just yesterday, as the iOS 7 NDA was lifted, the book went on sale.
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Sep 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
Windows Phone App Studio - Shows Potential ...
A couple of days ago Microsoft announced Windows Phone App Studio, a web based tool for the rapid creation of Windows Phone applications. In this blog post I take this new technology for a spin to see what it's capable of, and the interesting potential it has for creating 'personal' apps.
Colin Eberhardt · 9th  Aug 2013 · 5 min read
Tech
New iOS Article - How To Make a Custom Control
My latest iOS development article has been published on Ray Wenderlich's site, this time I look into how to develop custom iOS controls.
Colin Eberhardt · 3rd  Jun 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
ReversiEight - A Windows 8 Reversi Game
For the last six months or so I have been deeply immersed in a combination of iOS and HTML5 development. Now I don't want my C#/XAML skills to get too rusty, so over the weekend I decided to write a simple Windows 8 Store App.
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  May 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
HTML5 - It Just Got Real - Slides
A couple of days ago we hosted a one-day conference, HTML5 - It Just Got Real, at the Royal Society buildings in London. As promised, we have made all of our presentations available online.
Colin Eberhardt · 16th  May 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
Enhanced Windows Phone 8 Map Gestures
This blog post describes the addition of a two-finger rotation and three-finger pitch gesture to the Windows Phone 8 Map control.
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Apr 2013 · 6 min read
Tech
Comparing KendoUI and Knockout (with a bit of jQueryMobile on the side)
This blog post compares the same twitter search application written with both Knockout and Kendo in order to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each framework.
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  Apr 2013 · 9 min read
Tech
HTML5 - It Just Got Real - A One-day Conference in London 14th May
Announcing a one-day conference at the Royal Society, London UK, on the 14th of May.
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Mar 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
Windows Phone 8 Running App Article wins CodeProject competition
I've just received an email from those nice folks at CodeProject letting me know that my article 'A Windows Phone 8 Run Tracking App in 100 Lines of Code' has just won the Best Mobile article of January 2013 award.
Colin Eberhardt · 25th  Feb 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
Linq to Objective-C
In the past few months I have been immersing myself into the world of iOS development.
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Feb 2013 · 10 min read
Tech
CodeProject MVP 2013
Earlier today I received an email informing me that I have been awarded a CodeProject MVP for the year 2013.
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Jan 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
CodeProject Article on Xamarin Cross Platform Development
This article looks at how you can write a cross-platform mobile application with a shared C# code base using Xamarin MonoTouch.
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Jan 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
Introducing PropertyCross - Helping you select a cross-platform mobile framework
Introduces a new open source project that helps developers choose a suitable cross-platform framework
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Dec 2012 · 7 min read
Tech
A Multicast Delegate Pattern for iOS Controls
This blog post introduces a simple pattern for adding multicasting capabilities to existing iOS controls. Adding multicasting allows for improved clarity and code re-use.
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Nov 2012 · 4 min read
Tech
Ray Wenderlich and My Adventures in iOS
The technologies that we use to write applications for our end users are changing at a frightening pace!
Colin Eberhardt · 12th  Nov 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Integrating Knockout and jQueryMobile
This blog post looks at the issues regarding integration of KnockoutJS and jQueryMobile, and provides a simple worked example - a Twitter Search application - where the two technologies play nicely together!
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Oct 2012 · 7 min read
Tech
Clearer - A Gesture-Driven Windows 8 To-Do Application
A couple of days ago a published a new article on CodeProject, this latest article tackles the migration of a gesture-drive application from Windows Phone to Windows 8.
Colin Eberhardt · 12th  Oct 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Gesture-Driven To Do List Article Wins CodeProject Monthly Competition
I have just found out that my article "A Gesture-Driven Windows Phone To-Do List" won first place in the July 2012 best mobile article category.
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  Aug 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Property Finder - A Cross-platform HTML5 Mobile App
A while back, when PhoneGap for Windows Phone was still in beta, I created Property Finder, an application for searching UK property listings.
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Aug 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Book Review: iOS Programming for .NET Developers
A couple of weeks ago Josh Smith published his latest book, "iOS Programming for .NET Developers", which seeks to ease the transition from .NET to iOS developers.
Colin Eberhardt · 30th  Jul 2012 · 5 min read
Tech
A Gesture-Driven Windows Phone To-Do List - Complete Example
Over the past few weeks I have been working on a Windows Phone to-do list application, inspired by the iPhone Clear app.
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Jul 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
An Introduction and Thoughts on Developing iOS Applications with MonoTouch
This blog post describes the creation of a simple twitter search application for iOS, based on a similar application I wrote for Windows Phone a few months back.
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Jul 2012 · 13 min read
Tech
The Higgs Boson, Comic Sans and my 15 minutes of Twitter fame
It's been a busy Twitter day for me. A reasonably inane tweet that I posted this morning pointing out that the announcement of the (potential) Higgs Boson discovery was written using the much derided Comic Sans font has been retweeted thousands of times.
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Jul 2012 · 4 min read
Tech
A gesture-driven Windows Phone to-do application Part Two - drag re-ordering
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a todo list application which uses gestures to achieve its basic functions.
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Jun 2012 · 9 min read
Tech
A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8 - An Update
My blog post from yesterday "A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8" sparked a bit of furious debate on Twitter.
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Jun 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8
This blog post takes a look at what Windows Phone 8 (WP8) means for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) developers and the Microsoft development platform in general.
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Jun 2012 · 3 min read
Tech
Microsoft Surface vs. Apple iPad - a Visual Comparison
In this post I present a graphical comparison of the Microsoft Surface and Apple iPad tablets
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Jun 2012 · 2 min read
Tech
A gesture-driven Windows Phone to-do application
This blog post describes the implementation of a gesture-based todo-list application. The simple interface is controlled entirely by drag, flick and swipe.
Colin Eberhardt · 6th  Jun 2012 · 13 min read
Tech
Introducing the jQuery Mobile Metro Theme
This blog post introduces the new jQuery Mobile Metro theme and demonstrates how to create a web UI that detects the device it is being viewed on, to render a Metro UI on WP7 and iOS on other devices
Colin Eberhardt · 30th  Apr 2012 · 10 min read
Tech
WPF Charting Performance Comparisons (the Battle Continues)
This blog post presents a thorough analysis of the performance of various WPF Charting components. The results show that a new class of charting solutions, which use raster-based graphics as opposed to retained mode vector graphics, provide a considerable performance advantage
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Apr 2012 · 4 min read
Tech
Everything you wanted to know about databinding in WPF, Silverlight and WP7 (Part Two)
This is the second post in my series about databinding in Silverlight and WPF.
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Apr 2012 · 8 min read