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.
Delivery
This blog post discusses concerns around agile delivery, particularly within the public sector
Data Engineering
Yesterday the Financial Times boldly declared that BP saved $7bn since 2014 by investing in Big Data technologies. I spent a couple of hours researching Big Data technologies associated with BP members of staff to try and build up a picture of exactly which technologies they are using.
Data Engineering
Using microservices in your architecture is a very popular choice. Unfortunately it is also challenging to get it right. With the help of Twelve-Factor methodology, I will tell you how to set yourself up for a success rather than a disappointment.
Open Source
A few months ago we contributed a project, ContainerJS, to the Symphony Software Foundation, an organization that fosters open source and collaboration within financial services.
UX Design
In this post, I go over the similarities and differences between Sketch and Illustrator when working with type.
UX Design
Inspired by a recent dot chart visualisation focusing on the change of a value in different circumstances, this blog post presents the same data visualised using a slopegraph and compares and contrasts the two forms.
Tech
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.
Data Engineering
A successful attempt of load testing Alteryx API with Gatling and a not-so-successful attempt with Apache JMeter
Testing
This blog describes the ALF annual summit in London, why it is different in approach to other conferences, and what value conferences provide.
Tech
A walkthrough of setting up a WebPack 2 based build process for creating an Electron application in TypeScript, including configuring a build in Visual Studio Team Services.
Tech
Does npm 5 deprecate yarn? With promises of increased speed and consistent package versions yarn has a new competitor, but in this post I'll show the reasons for why, for the time being, I'll be sticking with yarn.
Tech
Following on from my previous blog post where I created a simple particle simulation using Go, I looked at adding some complexity.