Blog

Our thoughts on technology and design

Delivery
Those organisations who emerged stronger and more competitive from the 2008 global financial crisis are at it again. They have benefited significantly from past bold and decisive moves and now they are wasting no time adapting to the next version of the future. So what are the tenets of change this time?
Delivery
In this article, I would like to look at some traps that often impact performance in the workplace and outline some efficient ways to ensure your team is doing a good job.
UX Design
Design specs are often overlooked or unwelcome as part of the design process. However, by employing the same UX principles to this stage as we do to the rest of our work, we can optimise handover from design to development.
Tech
In this post, we work through building up a cubic spline from first principles first in Python, and then converting the Python code into an Alteryx macro
Delivery
Following the recent relaxation of Lockdown, and with reports circulating of further loosening, we can all start to look forward to something approaching normality. But what will constitute “normal” in the future, and what will this mean for the technology we use?
Tech
In this post, we look at creating a brute-force search approach to solve Matt Parker's Coin Puzzle using some binary manipulation within Alteryx
Tech
This blog post introduces the WebGL components which we recently added to D3FC, this suite of components make it easy to render charts with very large numbers of datapoints using D3. Throughout this post I'll describe the creation of the following visualisation, which displays 1 million books from the Hathi Trust library
Tech
One of the most common complaints when someone starts learning React Redux is that it's too magic. In this post, we'll be pulling back the curtain on React Redux to discover how it really works.
Tech
Async iterators are a great language feature that make working with asynchronous streams of data a joy to use. We'll take a look at consuming an async iterator running in a Web Worker from the main thread and see how we can use a library called Comlink to abstract away the fact it's running in a different execution context.
Cloud
Pulumi is one of a number of newer IaC solutions, providing developers with real code for defining their infrastructure resources and services. This post assumes some prior knowledge of IaC concepts and technologies, particular Terraform and Serverless, along with CircleCI
Delivery
I’m not loving you, the way I wanted to What I had to do, had to run from you
I’m in love with you, but the vibe is wrong
And that haunted me, all the way home
Tech
WebGL presents you with a blank canvas (literally!) and leaves you with what feels like an overwhelming set of decisions to make before you can render your idea on screen. This post introduces a quick reference guide to picking the right draw call for those trying to decipher the difference between drawArrays, drawElements and their oddly-ANGLE'd instanced equivalents.
Tech
The second in a series of posts exploring the things that Spring Boot does when it magically Autowires application dependencies. Is it really a kind of magic, or is there no such thing?
Delivery
In this post, I am discussing my exploratory journey into Power BI and how to connect it to Azure DevOps and Jira so we can create more advanced analytics such as Cycle Time scatter plots and Cumulative Flow Diagrams. It is the short step-by-step tutorial that I would have liked to find on my own hunt for information on the topic.
Tech
The date is March 31st of the year 2020, and things have gone wrong. What follows is the account of a software developer confined to his home in Bristol as the people of the world come together apart, in defiance of this simultaneously macro-and-micro-scopic attack on our very species.
Testing · Video
This webinar shares practical advice on the types of testing that should be added to your CI/CD pipeline, and explores the ways that testers and developers can collaborate to improve continuous testing.
Tech
Some might say I pushed the Micro:Bit too far. This post is not for those people. If your Micro:Bit is also struggling, this post will show you how to optimise your code and push it further
Tech
Rendering charts can be a very intensive operation for the browser, especially multiple charting widgets in the context of a wider application. OffscreenCanvas is growing in browser support and allows canvas rendering to be delegated to a WebWorker. This post looks at what performance improvements we can realistically expect and some gotchas that can crop up along the way.
Tech
Frontend web technologies are increasingly being used beyond traditional web applications. Could the next frontier be multi-window web apps that run in both the browser and on the desktop?
Resources
This white paper explores the benefits of starting small to ultimately build big, why this is difficult to do in practice, how to identify opportunities to break down bigger problems, and practical approaches to avoid failure.

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