Tech
It's the end of the #AdventofCode for 2020. I take a look back over the final 6 puzzles and sees how much was possible in BaseA Alteryx. How close did I get to solving all 50 stars in BaseA!
Open Source
A talk I gave at the virtual Open Source Strategy Forum conference in 2020, where I compared some of the challenges facing open source (complexity, fragility, sustainability) to those which triggered the financial crisis of 2008.
Tech
19 days in, the end of the third week of the #AdventofCode. The challenges have got harder and some have taken a little more than just BaseA Alteryx functionality but am still going strong. Here's my look back at solving the puzzles over the last 7 days.
Delivery
Remote working every day for months on end is a form of sensory deprivation. Our team working on the Scottish Government Payment Service is coming up with practical ways to address this and promote sustainable working. We want to share them here in case any are useful on your own projects.
Tech
As week 2 comes to a close on the Advent of Code, a look back at how the puzzles have been solved using BaseA by the community and me. The challenge has definitely increased this week!
Tech
Everyone hates bugs. Unfortunately, as codebases grow, it's easy for bugs to spread out of control. Fortunately, they can be brought back under control using psychology and a mathematical model from the 1950s.
Tech
OpenFin enables the use modern web technologies in place of older legacy systems. In this post we investigate the 3 primary communication techniques made available when using OpenFin to build the next generation of applications for the financial desktop.
Tech
It's the end of week one in the Advent of Code and, as has become a little bit of an annual tradition, I and other's from the Alteryx community are trying to solve with the base tools. In this post, I look back over the first 5 puzzles and how I (and others) have solved them.
Delivery
This is the first in a series of blogs on how to build effective remote teams. We’ll share insights and experiences from the Scott Logic delivery team working on the Scottish Government Payment Service as they shape optimal ways of working.
Tech
In this post I'll try to lay out some requirements for 'good' code, talk about how we might define 'easy' code and how this correlates with a definition of 'good' code.
Tech
The WebAssembly build of FFmpeg allows you to run this powerful video processing tool directly within the browser. In this blog post I explore FFmpeg.wasm and create a simple client-side transcoder that streams data into a video element, with a bit of RxJS thrown in for good measure.
UX Design
Nothing is preventing your organisation from innovating today in order to keep pace with user expectations, because properly using APIs helps you escape from the bonds of your legacy estate.
Tech
Narration.studio is my latest project: a web app for automatically editing voiceovers. In this first part, I introduce the project and the motivations behind it.
Tech
d3-zoom is incredibly robust, powerful and flexible. However, its flexibility means it can be quite complex to configure and use correctly. This post covers one way of wrapping it up, reducing its flexibility but vastly simplifying its use for my use-case.
Tech
Van Halen famously requested M&M's with no brown sweets as part of their 1982 world tour rider. What, if anything, is there to learn from this ridiculous demand, and can it help improve our software development processes?
Tech
Over the past few months I've had an ergonomic keyboard obsession. It started out simple, just wanting to improve my typing experience. It ended with me writing a driver. This is my story - now available as an audiobook!
Tech
This blog post looks at how CSS flexbox item sizing works, how it is used to create responsive layouts, and how it can be used to display interactive charts without using any Javascript.
Tech
Learn Rust, the tech industry's most loved programming language by building Snake, the simple but addictive game found preloaded on old Nokia mobile phones.