Blog

Our thoughts on technology and design

Tech
Van Halen famously requested M&M's with no brown sweets as part of their 1982 world tour rider. What, if anything, is there to learn from this ridiculous demand, and can it help improve our software development processes?
UX Design · Video
Genuine digital transformation is not possible unless Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are embraced and understood across a whole organisation, rather than just within technical teams. In this webinar, I tried to start taking non-technical folk on that journey.
Tech
Over the past few months I've had an ergonomic keyboard obsession. It started out simple, just wanting to improve my typing experience. It ended with me writing a driver. This is my story - now available as an audiobook!
Tech
This blog post looks at how CSS flexbox item sizing works, how it is used to create responsive layouts, and how it can be used to display interactive charts without using any Javascript.
Tech
Learn Rust, the tech industry's most loved programming language by building Snake, the simple but addictive game found preloaded on old Nokia mobile phones.
Testing
When working without testing resource on a project, I was looking for a tool to 'shake out' issues in the product. Colleagues suggested using a bug bash and this blog post explains what a bug bash is and how we went about running one.
UX Design
While APIs are nothing new, their technical nature means that their purposes and capabilities are rarely understood or championed by non-technical people in organisations, despite their huge significance in our digital world...
Tech
Redux is a great state management library, but its types are too broad. Using the builder pattern, we can generate exact types and ensure type-safety throughout an app.
Resources
This white paper is designed to help you better understand the potential of the humble Application Programming Interface (API) in unlocking genuine digital transformation.
Delivery
The energy transition will challenge everything especially your digital capabilities. The smart energy leaders are now talking to those who have been down this road before, are you?
UX Design
When we work on projects, we are often pressured by timelines and stakeholders to move on with our designs as quickly as possible. We need to be able to advocate the value of iterative design, to ensure that we are building the right thing, in the right way.
Tech
The world is racing for quantum supremacy, to solve problems once thought impossible on any reasonable timescale. In this post, I explain the fundamental principles that allow this to be possible.
Tech
This is part two of a series introducing Vue to developers who are new to the ecosystem and evaluating whether to include it in their next project. In this post we will look at Vue components but check out part one if you are looking for an initial overview.
Tech
This blog post is written for developers who have not used the Vue ecosystem before and want to decide whether to use it in a project or not. To help with this decision, this blog post will give a brief overview of the technology and ecosystem.
Tech
TypeScript's type system is amazing, but it can't do everything. In this post, I demonstrate how the builder pattern takes my types to the next level. We walk through an example in detail, so you can start using builders too.
UX Design
APIs "done properly" can be a significant strategic enabler, or even a whole new business proposition. This piece highlights some examples of this in action.
Delivery
Back in May I wrote a blog, Beyond COVID, discussing the changes we may see in the UK after the lockdown. With restrictions now lifting (or maybe not lifting), it seems to be a good time to revisit my thoughts and look ahead to the future.
Tech · Video
There's a standard approach to migrating legacy applications into desktop containers: the desktop equivalent of the strangler pattern – but this has its drawbacks. Is there another way? In this webinar, I shed light on an alternative that addresses these drawbacks and opens up new opportunities for old tech. And I explain what on earth rollercoasters have to do with it.
Tech
Published in 2007, Amazon's Dynamo paper changed the distributed database world. As well as powering AWS S3, it also inspired many well known open-source NoSQL technologies such as Apache Cassandra, LinkedIn's Voldemort and Basho's Riak. This post intends to present the paper and its concepts in a digestable way.
Testing
Variables allow you to store and reuse values in your requests and scripts. Storing a value in a variable allows you to reference it throughout your environments and collections. It’s also practical because if you want to update a value, you have to change it only in one place. There are a few types of variables in Postman and might be confusing where to use which so in this blogpost I will try to explain that.

Authors