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.
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.
Tech
Ray tracing is the process of simulating light rays to render a 3D scene. It seems really complicated at first, but it's actually quite simple. After reading this post, you could easily implement one yourself!
People
International Women's Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Here's a roundup of some of the things we’ve been doing across the company to celebrate.
Tech
I recently got the chance to play around with a BBC Micro:Bit - an educational toy aimed at helping kids learn to program. It's designed to do a lot of things, but 3D rendering isn't one of them.
Delivery
Traditional metrics tracking progress against a plan are not fit for purpose in an agile environment. Quality metrics often focus mainly on bugs producing numbers that are most often not very meaningful. I am discussing a different approach to both using Flow to judge process efficiency and a measure of practices used to express quality.
Tech
A look at the design principals behind the Aeron messaging system and the consequences on its suitability for Scott Logic's purposes.
Tech
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?
Tech
Practicing Continuous Integration & Deployment, we can get new features to users faster and tighten our feedback loops. In this introduction to CI/CD, I introduce and explain an example GitHub Actions workflow which builds your front-end and deploys it with GitHub Pages
Tech
After hearing about Svelte, a performance-first web framework, I tried it out in a web-based Minesweeper solver. SHOCKINGLY, it didn't automatically make my code fast - that took a process of iterative optimisation
Delivery
In this post, I discuss agility in more general terms than thinking about any specific framework. My aim is to highlight the overarching purpose of agility for businesses as a whole as opposed to concentrating at the team level as I have seen so often.
Testing
A short story on my maiden voyage into the world of Cypress - the test tool, not the country. This is an overview on how I discovered Cypress, how I configured it, created tests and how I drifted away from the standard setup to utilise the provided TypeScript and Cucumber plugins to make it work with the application development project we were delivering.
Delivery
Setting a Sprint Goal is a powerful means of achieving focus, motivating and inspiring your team. So why is it always forgotten about?
Tech
For the past 3 months, I have been a bit obsessed with Minesweeper. It has plagued my honeymoon, stolen my free time, and been the subject of two tech talks. That's a good thing.
Testing
To achieve continuous deployment, we need to achieve continuous confidence of our software.
We need to think about Continuous Testing.