Blog

Our thoughts on technology and design

UX Design
In this post, I go over the similarities and differences between Sketch and Illustrator when working with type.
UX Design
Inspired by a recent dot chart visualisation focusing on the change of a value in different circumstances, this blog post presents the same data visualised using a slopegraph and compares and contrasts the two forms.
Delivery
This blog post discusses the merits of adopting a culture of continuous change
Tech
Place names in UK and Ireland are very much influenced by their surroundings, with endings such as -hill, -ford, and -wood quite clearly referencing local geography. This blog post uses the new NDJSON command line tools for processing, transforming and joining datasets to create an optimised visualisation.
Data Engineering
A successful attempt of load testing Alteryx API with Gatling and a not-so-successful attempt with Apache JMeter
UX Design · Video
Why don't we adopt responsive design on the desktop? In this talk I demonstrate the power and fresh challenge of applying responsive design to desktop productivity applications.
Testing
This blog describes the ALF annual summit in London, why it is different in approach to other conferences, and what value conferences provide.
Tech
A walkthrough of setting up a WebPack 2 based build process for creating an Electron application in TypeScript, including configuring a build in Visual Studio Team Services.
Tech
Does npm 5 deprecate yarn? With promises of increased speed and consistent package versions yarn has a new competitor, but in this post I'll show the reasons for why, for the time being, I'll be sticking with yarn.
Tech
Following on from my previous blog post where I created a simple particle simulation using Go, I looked at adding some complexity.
Testing
This blog describes a one day event in London where leading tech companies were discussing tools they use to make their development and operations scale and be more efficient.
Tech
Using two of the currently most popular web frameworks I'll demonstrate how to create semantic looking code.
Tech
Theming an application is a concern for many organisations and products. In this post I'll present a simple way to manage branding using current tooling.
Cloud
This post takes a look at the recently launched GitHub App platform, that allows developers to create integrations and services which can be shared with others. The post describes the development of gifbot, a simple and fun App!
Delivery
While there is much written about Agile, it’s important to understand not only the principles of the frameworks but also what it means to *be* Agile.
UX Design
Insurance is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to user experience. This post will detail some thoughts on what can be done in the short term to steer their customer’s experience in the right direction.
Cloud
This blog post describes the process of creating a GitHub bot, hosted as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda function, that performs various checks on pull requests.
Delivery
It is a great joy to be a member of a productive team that delivers exceptional value. In this blog post I will share things that developers can be doing to make that happen. Ideas presented are funded in Agile principles and Lean manufacturing.
Tech
Two years ago I wrote about TypeScript compiler APIs. There has recently been further progress in this area and I explore the newly exposed API in TypeScript 2.3.
Testing
At the Agile North East Lightning Talks Competition I had 8 minutes to tell a room full of people how to help testers succeed.

Authors