UX Design
Facilitating UX workshops can be challenging when ideating with non-designers who have not participated in a UX workshop and are sceptical about its value. In this post, I suggest four tips for achieving successful UX workshops and gaining the trust of the more sceptical participants.
Tech
When creating d3 visualisations it's common to want some form of responsive layout. However, SVG and canvas don't provide a native way to do this. Most examples found online either use fixed dimensions or resort to some form of manual layout to achieve the required effect. This post introduces an alternative approach using CSS and custom elements.
Tech
In this post I will talk about Consumer Driven Contracts in Microservices architectures. I will also give an example of how to use Pact in a modern JavaScript application.
Testing
Fiddler's AutoResponder is a great tool to mock API Responses when you're testing front end logic. It's simple but provides some powerful testing options. This is a short post to show you how.
Tech
Recreating the data used for the Guardian's Unaffordable Country visualisation in Apache Spark.
Tech
A few days ago the roadmap for future Angular releases, starting with v.4 in March 2017, was unveiled. It once again made me re-visit my personal doubts about semantic versioning, the underlying issue being that it is great for computers, but bad for humans. Considering that people are the primary consumers of your libraries and frameworks this can’t be right? Perhaps a hybrid approach that combines both semantic and romantic versioning would keep both the computers and the humans happy?
Data Engineering
Big Data can help businesses run more efficiently. Their main challenge is getting the best value from the data they have to turn it into actionable information
Tech
For the past four years I've been an author on Ray Wenderlich's website which provides tutorials for iOS developers. I don't do much native iOS development these days, However, I do like to keep my skills up to date. As part of this team I sometimes find myself being assigned topics that I wouldn't otherwise look into. And so it was, a couple of months ago, that I received an assignment to write a tutorial on the open source AudioKit project.
Tech
We’ve recently been investigating uses for the blockchain and as part of this, we’ve developed our own system called Scottcoin. This post will explore the core components of the Bitcoin system, how a transaction goes through it, how our internal version differs and what advantages and disadvantages it brings.
Data Engineering
In this post I describe how to use Elastic's Rally to generate benchmarks for your private Elasticsearch queries and clusters. I'll be creating a benchmark which allows comparison of an unscored query with one where scoring is enabled.
Data Engineering
The popularity of Spring Boot in the Java world is undeniable. In this post I will show you yet another reason for this. Using Spring Boot makes working with MongoDB an absolute pleasure.
People
Lead Test Engineer Daniel recently produced a blog tackling the myths around software testing, one of which being ‘testing is boring’. In this post, fellow Test Engineer Hannah delves a little deeper into this misconception and things we can do to dispel it.
Delivery
The demand for speed in Digital Transformation is set against a backdrop of legacy technology, processes and procurement methods, demanding a culture shift
Testing
How I used R to collect and analyse all of the tweets made about Test Bash Manchester, a recent software testing conference.
Tech
Yesterday I attended (and spoke!) at the 2016 Bristech conference, an event aimed at polyglots, innovators and the "tech curious". It was a full house at the Watershed with over 400 tickets sold. I had a great time at the conference, attending quite a few talks myself. What made the conference interesting to me was the diverse range of subjects covered - design, security, even physics! Presented here are some brief notes and comments from the day's proceedings.
Tech
In this post, I take a look at writing a simple particle simulation as a way of learning some of the basics of the Go language.
Testing
I was lucky enough to attend Test Bash Manchester recently. This is my first hand report of the experience. Find out what happened when testers from around the world all came together to talk about testing.
Tech
Awareness of Bitcoin has steadily grown, but understanding of it less so. Allow us to shed some light.