Testing
Taking the time upfront to consider the focus of your testing can pay dividends. It shouldn’t just be a priority to test early to decrease the cost of fixing issues, it should also be a priority to test in the right way from the start, to ensure we are meeting the needs of our users.
Tech
In highly-visual, rapidly-updating, multi-window, buzzword-laden apps performance is a big concern. With WebWorkers, SharedWorkers and ServiceWorkers we have a number of options for moving complex scripting tasks off the critical path. However, rendering can be more of a dark art. In this post I'll dig into how one browser (Chromium) uses renderer processes and how you can use this knowledge to your advantage.
Tech
Java Optional has been around for a while now. It is a pity that this language feature is not used more often by developers. This is a simple demonstration of how to use it correctly.
Delivery
A discussion of how companies develop rules in line with the values they hold, and how to deal with situations where those rules obstruct you from your job.
Data Engineering
In this quick look at the R language and tools I'll look briefly at the syntax of the language and have a go at creating a few charts with a data set.
Tech
First introduced to me as “upside-down recursion”, dynamic programming is a technique used to write efficient algorithms to solve a wide range of problems, often replacing recursive approaches. Having met many examples in the past few years, this post explores three applications I’ve seen for the benefit of those new to the technique.
Tech
A quick look at Apache Storm with a short word count walk-through example using a Redis Database.
Tech
If you're a fan of Redux Saga then you will have noticed the abundance of libraries to assist testing your sagas. This post takes an in-depth look into the different approaches to testing sagas, describing where five popular testing libraries fit into these approaches.
Tech
In this post, I create an interactive map of relative changes in currency strength, using D3's geographic projections, world map data, and a currency exchange API.
Delivery
Being software developer requires technical insight and analytical approach. Yet, this is just part of the role. This article explores soft skills that are important part of every software developers life.
Tech
I show a simple use of the PostGIS Postgres database extension to combine route data from Strava and postcode data.
Testing
The focus of this article is not on finding advantages or disadvantages of Selenium WebDriver, but I mainly focus on investigating pros and cons of different tools/frameworks in combination with Selenium WebDriver. Thus this article is good for those who already know Selenium and would like to gain knowledge of using different tools in combination with Selenium.
Delivery
In our professional work life we regularly come across difficult people we’d love to avoid, ignore or get away from - this is especially true if you are a consultant or contractor and work with so many different people. In reality however, we have to collaborate also with difficult people. In this article I want to look at the situations, types of people and some techniques that can help.
Resources
Data lakes? Most Financial Service organisations either have one or are considering one. This white paper explains key considerations and a warning to help guide their creation or optimisation to fulfil its requirement
Cloud
AWS recently announced a couple of new container services, EKS and Fargate, and I'll give a brief overview, a "first experience" walkthrough of Fargate, and discuss when you might want to choose it.
Tech
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!
Tech
As interns at the Newcastle office we were tasked with creating an interactive desk directory to allow new employees to better acquaint themselves with their building and colleagues, with the speculative goal of replacing the company-wide internal phone directory. The original brief specified we should present a graphical view of the office layout generated from an existing office plan stored in Google Sheets.
Open Source
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.
Tech
Last week I took a trip to London to attend CodeMesh, the Alternative Programming Conference. Attending conferences can be a way to expand your horizons and inspire interest in a variety of topics, and CodeMesh did this for me and more, with a great line-up of experienced speakers. Here I'll describe a few of the talks I attended.
Tech
I'll be taking a first look at Polymer 3.0, including how to integrate other technologies, as well as comparing it with other front-end frameworks.