Blog

Our thoughts on technology and design

Tech
This blog post shares a few quick tips and patterns that I've been using to structure JavaScript promises; keeping them clean, simple and readable.
Testing
Custom locators are great for when you need to roll your own, but they can require some tweaking when an application starts to get more complex. Here I'll look at how to chain custom locators.
Testing
I decided to do some research into testers and the challenges we face in the work place to find some answers. These are some my findings.
Tech
It’s been a couple of months since my first post about the security of Electron. With v1.0 having recently been released I felt it was time for a a fresh look
Data Engineering
An experiment in writing a volume plugin for Docker
Data Engineering
An insight into the ELK stack and how we used it on a big data project
Testing
Test metrics have for too long been the 'Holy Grail' of determining quality. This blog post looks at the reason why the metric of 'defect density' should perhaps have a second thought before use to determine software and tester quality.
UX Design
Body as interface is plausible either when the body is in a controlled environment or when the device becomes part of the body. Exploring this notion allows us to stop designing interfaces and start designing experiences.
Tech
For the past few weeks, Laurie Collingwood and myself have been working on a prototype banking app with an animated graph. In this post we’ll discuss some of what we’ve learned during the project and talk generally about animation with HTML5 canvas.
Tech
Being a software developer requires constantly improving ones knowledge. This is a short list of books that made the largest impact on me as Java developer. I hope that you too will find here something that will take you to the next level!
UX Design
We have recently been working on concept designs for a banking app aimed at the new generation of bank users. The main screen of one of such concepts hinges on a seamless transition between different views to communicate the relationship in the underlying data.
Tech
The redux pattern provides a simple (and strict) pattern for managing state; a single store holds the state while a reducer applies actions, evolving the application state.
UX Design · Video
Conversational Commerce drastically re-imagines the way services are delivered to customers by moving interactions with them into chat, messaging or other natural language interfaces such as voice. The following video captures some of our initial thoughts on how this might apply to financial services.
UX Design
The size of things is relative to the scale that we set. This might sound like a trivial notion, but it is key to creating meaningful data visualisations.
People
An insight into how software testers at Scott Logic work.
Tech
In this post, we discuss design and implementation choices for account and session management features, and how these trade off against usability and other goals.
Testing
This is part 2 of the Using WebdriverIO guide where we'll be taking a closer look at the tests and implementing the page-object model.
Testing
WebdriverIO is a great addition to your automation toolkit. This 2-part post first walks through configuring WebdriverIO and automating the test process using Gulp, before taking a look at the tests themselves and abstracting using the page-object model in part 2.
Cloud
Inspired by Colin's article on building an expenses app with the Mondo API, I wanted to create something to make use of the webhook API which fires in real-time (ish) whenever a transaction happens. In this post I'll cover subscribing to the Mondo webhook, creating the glue code as an AWS Lambda and pushing pins into the Pebble Timeline REST API.
Tech
Kotlin is the latest JVM-targeted language to see a 1.0.0 release. Having experimented with it for a short while I thought I would capture my experience and point out a few gotchas.

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