Tech
A common misconception I have frequently observed in organisations that are adopting agile is around using story points for planning, forecasting and progress tracking. Long- and mid-term planning in agile can have devastating effects on teams, which is why I’d like to shed some light on it and talk about how the situation can be tackled in an agile way providing much better results for the project and the organisation itself.
Tech
A quick guide to the available source map options in webpack, and the considerations for choosing one in different scenarios.
Tech
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).
Tech
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Video
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.
People
Following the success of Scott Logic's first Bugathon in Newcastle last March, members of the Edinburgh and Newcastle teams grouped together to organise another Bugathon at Heriot-Watt University's Edinburgh campus. Held on Wednesday, October 18th, this post gives an insight into the work carried out by Scott Logic to prepare and run the event.
Tech
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.
Data Engineering
Apache Kafka provides distributed log store used by increasing numbers of companies and often forming the heart of systems processing huge amounts of data. This post shows how to use it for storing meteorological data and displaying this in a graphical dashboard with Graphite and Grafana
Tech
JUnit 5 has been available for a few weeks now so in this post I will investigate setting it up and migrating from JUnit 4 then explore some of the new features available.
Delivery
Working for a Digital agile consultancy was my first real exposure to Government / Public Service projects. GDS provide an exceptional amount of process and control for any OGD (Originating Government Department) so trying to follow their rules, the client's wishes and employing a succesful agile delivery methodology can mean serving multiple masters. It did (sometimes) work out.
Data Engineering
A discussion about Cassandra consistency levels and replication factor, which are frequently misunderstood. This post explains the Cassandra infrastructure and how its configuration can be tuned.
Testing
Having good tests is vital for maintaing code but it is difficult to assess the quality of your tests. Mutation testing provides one way of evaluating your tests. In this post I will be using PIT with Java to demonstrate the capabilities of mutation testing.
Delivery
If you're new to Agile you've probably heard the term Story Point a few times and, especially if you come from a more traditional project management or product background, you may be trying to figure out what a Story Point is and how big one is. This article tries to explain what this is in a more digestible format.
Tech
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.
People
As the Edinburgh 2017 Summer Interns, Arran Rashid and I have spent twelve weeks working on a new foyer screen for the Scott Logic offices, this post describes the project and our time at Scott Logic.
Delivery
With a well publicised history of multi-billion pound IT failures and operating inefficiencies the UK government took the decision to adopt agile across the public sector. This is a brief look at the history of that adoption and lessons learned for those with an interest in agile project delivery.
Tech
Jest is a testing framework that provides the testing tools we now expect to see in a modern software project. It provides fast parallelised test running, with a familiar assertion syntax, built in code coverage, Snapshots and more. In this post, I'll be investigating Snapshots and laying out some thoughts!
Data Engineering
Lichess makes over 100GB of chess games from 2017 available on their website. This post shows how this data can be transformed with Apache Spark and analysed. Something for Data Engineers and Chess Enthusiasts alike!
People
This blog post, written by a graduate developer joining the Edinburgh team, reflects on his induction week experience at Newcastle. A total of sixteen graduates across UX, development, and testing joined this August, and the induction was an ideal opportunity for everyone to meet.
Tech
This post demonstrates one way to add Selenium e2e tests to a `create-react-app` generated app. It uses Jest as the test runner, embraces modern JavaScript features (including async/await, modules, fat-arrow functions, templated strings, etc.) and attempts to ensure that modern editors are able to provide useful auto-complete suggestions when authoring tests.
Tech
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.