Blog

Our thoughts on technology and design

Delivery
It negatively affects all of us mentally and physiologically, yet we seem unable to stop. But are we really doomed to increasingly crumble under the weight of our workload, or can we change our ways to fit the agile world?
Data Engineering
Distributed log technologies have matured in the last few years. In this article, I review the attributes of distributed log technologies, compare four of the most popular and suggest how to choose the one that's right for you.
People
The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium is an annual one day event for students of Computing and related subjects, students have the chance to talk to companies offering career opportunities.
Testing
Thinking of applying to work with us as a tester? This is a post to help you work out if we are a good fit for you. We'll do this by telling you how we work out if you are a good fit for us. Hopefully this will be of interest to anyone trying to evaluate if the benefits we offer are in line with the environment they want.
Testing
"Lets hand it over to QA”. This phrase is seen and heard a lot, more so when chucking stuff over the development waterfall edge but even now, this is an oft used term as a synonym for testing. Terminology, naming, what we call something or someone can have a powerful impact on how something is viewed. Even worse when terminology becomes interchangeable, even though what each represents is actually something very different.
Tech
What is npx? How is it useful and why should you care? Find out how you can use npx to run global npm packages without having them installed.
Tech
Key lessons I took from Eric Evans' book "Domain Driven Design". A brief summary of the book's concepts and why you should read it.
Testing
Test Bash Brighton is one of the biggest testing conferences in the UK. I was given the privilege of attending and was so taken in by it all I felt compelled to write up my thoughts, feelings and experiences in detail!
Tech
A short tour of different museums and exhibitions that have used technology to support their displays.
Data Engineering
Apache Spark is the major talking point in Big Data pipelines, boasting performance 10-100x faster than comparable tools. But how achievable are these speeds and what can you do to avoid memory errors? In this blog I will use a real example to introduce two mechanisms of data movement within Spark and demonstrate how they form the cornerstone of performance.
Tech
Mock the back-end of your web application, using Node.js, to make developing and testing the front-end easier.
Delivery
This Halloween, coming to a project near you... What horrors lurk on Agile projects when they go wrong? And how do we slay these beasts?
Data Engineering
Spark is well known in Big Data for its incredible performance and expressive API. However, it just takes one small misstep to transform a massively parallel powerhouse into a pathetically poor performer. This post presents an example and the steps that can be taken to indentify the problem.
Tech
How Scott Logic consultants worked with Rabobank's London IT department to improve DevOps practices.
Tech
Following from my recent article on Machine Learning with Scikit Learn, I decided to experiment with the library that is most loved by developers today: TensorFlow. Similar to Scikit Learn, this post walks through a simple example of TensorFlow to categorise handwritten digits.
Delivery
DevOps culture is a critical part of successfully delivering an enterprise scale project. Getting that culture into a company requires a mindset change. In this article, I explore the journey to the DevOps Culture, DevOps Mindset and provide some practical advice based on my experiences.
Tech
Apache Curator is a client side library providing convenience and out of the box algorithms when working with Apache Zookeeper. In this blog we take a quick look at how to implement a leadership election.
Testing
Why do we write tests? When should we write tests? Which tests is it alright to skip? And have that angry mob of TDD developers actually achieved 100% test coverage?
Delivery
Can the perfect team evolve beyond the need for sprint retrospectives?
UX Design
Animation prototyping tools have been increasing in popularity, but also in variety. I spent a week exploring these tools and in this post I will try to gauge which tool is most appropriate for the needs and workflows of our team.

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