Artificial Intelligence
LangChain has become a tremendously popular toolkit for building a wide range of LLM-powered applications, including chat, Q&A and document search. In this blogpost I re-implement some of the novel LangChain functionality as a learning exercise, looking at the low-level prompts it uses to create these higher level capabilities.
Podcast
In this episode, I'm joined by colleagues Oliver Cronk, Chris Price and James Heward for a lively debate on whether the latest advances in generative AI are going to threaten our jobs – are we going to be made redundant by our own creation?
Artificial Intelligence
It’s been over a year since I last blogged about OpenAI. Whilst DALL-E 2, ChatGPT and GPT4 have grabbed all of the headlines, there were a lot of other interesting things showing up on their blog in the background. This post runs through just over six months of progress from Sept 2021 - March 2022.
Podcast
In this episode – the second of a two-parter – we talk to Denis Mandich, CTO of Qrypt, about the growing threat that Quantum Computers will ultimately render our current cryptographic techniques useless – an event dubbed ‘Y2Q’, in a nod to the Y2K issue we faced over twenty years ago.
Artificial Intelligence
The buzz and excitement around generative AI is continuing to grow as their capabilities rapidly expand. However, their ability to generate content is just the starting point. From my perspective, the emergent reasoning capability, coupled with their intelligent use of tools, is what will make this technology truly transformational, and will mark the start of a new technology epoch.
Testing
An RxJS unbeliever explores the testing tools built into the library and is pleasantly surprised.
Tech
Xamarin Forms has now been superseded with .NET MAUI. In this blog post, I'm looking at the process of upgrading an existing Xamarin Forms project to MAUI. How much effort is needed and what will still work or needs to be updated.
Podcast
In this episode, we talk about Quantum Computing with Denis Mandich, CTO of Qrypt. As well as discussing quantum physics, we cover the practical aspects of cloud-based Quantum Computers and what can be achieved today through circuit design. Finally, we look to the future to discuss the impact this breakthrough technology is likely to have.
Tech
What is the best way to test the repository layer of a spring boot application? Or should you test it at all? What are Testcontainers and how to use them? This article addresses them all with examples, so you can make a better decision when you are faced with a similar challenge in future.
Podcast
In this episode, I'm joined by my colleague, Oliver Cronk, and Chris Booth from NatWest for a lively discussion about the much-hyped ChatGPT – covering its origins and recent advances, the new discipline of prompt engineering, and some practical applications and limitations of this technology.
Tech
Newcomer desktop-web framework Tauri has quickly attracted the interest of developers looking to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies. Promises of smaller and faster applications certainly appeal to those using Electron. In this post, I’ll take a look at what’s new in this space, what distinguishes them, and why WebView2 doesn’t solve everything.
Data Engineering
The pandemic response required a remarkable level of collaboration between and beyond government departments. In this blog post, I’m going to look at the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable People Service, outlining the different areas of collaboration upon which the service depended, and reflecting on the lessons that government can take forward to achieve its vision of a responsible, efficient and effective data ecosystem.
Tech
Late last year I attended DevTernity, an all-remote generalist software development conference. In this post I'll cover off some points of interest from some of the talks I chose to attend, and reflect on the remote conference experience.
Data Engineering
Data-literate leadership underpinned the most successful pandemic-response programmes. In this post, I explore what data-literate leadership looks like, drawing on examples from the roundtables on data sharing in government that the Institute for Government ran in partnership with Scott Logic.
Tech
Here are five books that influenced my coding style and working practices early in my career. A top list of anything is deeply personal, so I’ve tried to select books I found both inspirational and informative, with an equal focus on technical and non-technical skills.
Podcast
In this episode, I’m joined by colleagues Oliver Cronk, Peter Chamberlin and Chris Price for a lively discussion about blockchain, including the mechanics of bitcoin, the proof of work consensus, and technologies which are blockchain-like, but prefer not to use that term. Finally, we ask ourselves the question, is blockchain just hype?
People
When people came to meet us at the Scott Logic stand at Women of Silicon Roundabout, we took the opportunity to ask them “What would make somewhere a most loved workplace for you?” We received over 200 responses and I reflect on the results in this post.
Tech
A Vim clutch is typically a repurposed keyboard/guitar pedal that enters insert mode when you press down on it and leaves it when you release it. This can and has been accomplished in a great many weird and wonderful ways. This post adds yet another to that list.