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
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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.
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.
Tech
Over the past several years there has been a lot of talk about cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, and the blockchain technology that underpins them. However it can be difficult to understand how the blockchain actually works in practice, and why it is such a clever method for currency exchange. Two of our graduates are currently developing our own cryptocurrency for use within Scott Logic, as an attempt to better understand the practical uses of the blockchain. In this blog post, we aim to explain the inner workings of the blockchain and help people to understand how it manages to keep transactions both secure and anonymous. This post will go into the low level algorithms of blockchain and provide verified examples alongside each algorithm; this post is not for the faint of heart!
Tech
This post uses React to show how we can use features from functional programming in everyday JavaScript, and integrates RxJS to show how these approaches are common across many frameworks today.
People
A first-timer at the annual BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but was keen to answer any questions about careers in software.
Tech
Mondo Bank has recently moved into public Beta, sending out 1,000 cards to trial customers each week. I received my Beta card a few days ago, and have been using it ever since. This blog post takes a quick look at the Mondo API and how I used it to automate expense claims!
Tech
Along with the modularisation of code, D3 version 4 also brings new support for canvas drawing, thanks to the d3-path package introduced in version 4.
People
Nic Hemley, Head of Development for Scott Logic in Bristol, co-founded the Bristech meetup in July 2013, inspired by an existing group in Edinburgh. In this series of blog posts, Nic will be telling the story of this meetup: its genesis, challenges and possible future direction.