Colin Eberhardt

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 · 1^st Aug · 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 · 8^th Jul · 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 · 20^th Jun · 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, , · 15^th Jun · 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 · 3^rd May · 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 · 16^th Apr · 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 · 5^th Apr · 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 · 8^th Mar · 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 · 28^th Feb · 1 min read

Tech

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 · 23^rd Feb · 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 · 20^th Dec 2021 · 6 min read

Tech

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 · 8^th 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 · 21^st 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 · 13^th 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 · 14^th Sep 2021 · 4 min read

Tech · 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 · 1^st Aug 2021

Tech

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 · 3^rd 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 · 21^st 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 · 17^th 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 · 22^nd 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 · 15^th 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 · 23^rd 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 · 26^th 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 · 13^th 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 · 24^th 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 · 19^th 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 · 1^st 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 · 3^rd 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 · 24^th 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 · 26^th 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 · 15^th 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 · 17^th 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 · 9^th 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 · 27^th 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 · 18^th 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 · 4^th 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 · 14^th 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 · 3^rd 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 · 22^nd 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 · 9^th 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 · 18^th 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 · 21^st 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 · 20^th 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 · 19^th 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 · 29^th 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 · 26^th 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 · 24^th 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 · 27^th 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 · 13^th 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 · 22^nd 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 · 30^th 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 · 28^th 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 · 17^th 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 · 14^th 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 · 23^rd Aug 2017 · 8 min read

Open Source

cla-bot a GitHub bot for automating Contributor Licence Agreements

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 16^th 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 · 25^th 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 · 22^nd 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 · 8^th 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 · 5^th 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 · 28^th 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 · 26^th 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 · 19^th Jan 2017 · 1 min read

Tech

Semantic Versioning is not enough

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Dec 2016 · 5 min read

Tech

A Journey Through Sound Synthesis with AudioKit

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 30^th 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 · 10^th 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 · 7^th Jul 2016

Tech

Recursive Pattern Matching and Transformation of JavaScript AST

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd 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 · 10^th Jun 2016 · 12 min read

Tech

Applying redux reducers to arrays

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th 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 · 28^th 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 · 22^nd 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 · 25^th 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 · 5^th Jan 2016 · 8 min read

Tech

Most popular tech blog posts of 2015

Colin Eberhardt · 4^th 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 · 24^th 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 · 7^th 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 · 18^th 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 · 15^th Oct 2015

Resources

White Paper: HTML5 Migration – Get started with a Little Bang

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 11^th 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 · 5^th 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 · 15^th 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 · 8^th 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 · 28^th 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 · 24^th 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 · 26^th 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 · 26^th 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 · 5^th 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 · 11^th 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 · 5^th 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 · 2^nd Feb 2015 · 9 min read

Tech

Exception Handling in Swift

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 27^th 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 · 8^th 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 · 20^th 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 · 4^th 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 · 29^th 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 · 14^th 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 · 24^th 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 · 22^nd 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 · 18^th Sep 2014 · 1 min read

Tech

The Game of Life with Functional Swift

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 10^th 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 · 1^st 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 · 24^th 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 · 10^th 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 · 7^th 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 · 26^th 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 · 19^th 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 · 11^th 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 · 12^th 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 · 20^th 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 · 19^th 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 · 13^th 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 · 31^st 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 · 29^th 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 · 27^th 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 · 26^th 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 · 20^th 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 · 19^th 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 · 9^th Aug 2013 · 5 min read

Tech

New iOS Article - How To Make a Custom Control

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 3^rd Jun 2013 · 1 min read

Tech

ReversiEight - A Windows 8 Reversi Game

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd 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 · 16^th May 2013 · 1 min read

Tech

Enhanced Windows Phone 8 Map Gestures

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Apr 2013 · 6 min read

Tech

Comparing KendoUI and Knockout (with a bit of jQueryMobile on the side)

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 8^th Apr 2013 · 9 min read

Tech

HTML5 - It Just Got Real - A One-day Conference in London 14th May

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 28^th 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 · 25^th Feb 2013 · 1 min read

Tech

Linq to Objective-C

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Feb 2013 · 10 min read

Tech

CodeProject MVP 2013

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 7^th Jan 2013 · 1 min read

Tech

CodeProject Article on Xamarin Cross Platform Development

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 4^th 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 · 21^st Dec 2012 · 7 min read

Tech

A Multicast Delegate Pattern for iOS Controls

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Nov 2012 · 4 min read

Tech

Ray Wenderlich and My Adventures in iOS

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 12^th Nov 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Integrating Knockout and jQueryMobile

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 23^rd Oct 2012 · 7 min read

Tech

Clearer - A Gesture-Driven Windows 8 To-Do Application

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 12^th Oct 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Gesture-Driven To Do List Article Wins CodeProject Monthly Competition

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 29^th Aug 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Property Finder - A Cross-platform HTML5 Mobile App

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 23^rd Aug 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Book Review: iOS Programming for .NET Developers

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 30^th Jul 2012 · 5 min read

Tech

A Gesture-Driven Windows Phone To-Do List - Complete Example

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 26^th Jul 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

An Introduction and Thoughts on Developing iOS Applications with MonoTouch

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 24^th Jul 2012 · 13 min read

Tech

The Higgs Boson, Comic Sans and my 15 minutes of Twitter fame

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 5^th Jul 2012 · 4 min read

Tech

A gesture-driven Windows Phone to-do application Part Two - drag re-ordering

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 27^th Jun 2012 · 9 min read

Tech

A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8 - An Update

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd Jun 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 21^st 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 · 20^th Jun 2012 · 2 min read

Tech

A gesture-driven Windows Phone to-do application

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 6^th 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 · 30^th 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 · 24^th Apr 2012 · 4 min read

Tech

Everything you wanted to know about databinding in WPF, Silverlight and WP7 (Part Two)

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Apr 2012 · 8 min read

Tech

KnockoutJS vs. Silverlight - a new CodeProject article

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 12^th Apr 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Everything you wanted to know about databinding in WPF, Silverlight and WP7 (Part One)

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 5^th Apr 2012 · 10 min read

Tech

Developing a GWT TodoMVC application

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 12^th Mar 2012 · 8 min read

Tech

Plotting Circular Relationships Graphs with Silverlight

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 8^th Mar 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Slides and code from my WPUG talk on PhoneGap

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 29^th Feb 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Visualising StackOverflow Tag Relationships with Silverlight

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Feb 2012 · 2 min read

Tech

The Gradual Decline in Silverlight Adoption

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 13^th Feb 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

WPUG Talk: Developing cross-platform mobile applications with PhoneGap for Windows Phone 7

In a couple of weeks I will be giving a talk on using PhoneGap for cross platform mobile application development at the WPUG #NotAtMWC12 event on Tuesday, February 28, in London. This post gives a brief overview of my talk and a video.

Colin Eberhardt · 9^th Feb 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

A Simple Pattern for Creating Re-useable UserControls in WPF / Silverlight

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 6^th Feb 2012 · 8 min read

Tech

WP7 PhoneGap Backbutton Support Re-visited

a quick summary of your post

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Jan 2012 · 2 min read

Tech

Windows Phone 7 - Browsing your Photos via Bing Maps

a quick summary of your post