A Learning Swarm is designed to be a highly effective way to rapidly generate shared knowledge within a team on a topic they previously had no experience in.
November 18, 2020
How do you decide if you should buy software or build it yourself? In this post I look at cost and how we can frame it so that we make the best decision for our company, focusing on opportunity cost.
August 4, 2020
Smoke tests are used to make sure your service isn't on fire by checking for smoke. They fail fast giving you immediate feedback, leaving you and your team productive
July 27, 2020
Functional Programming helps create more robust software systems, this post outlines what makes them more robust
April 14, 2020
In January I attended AgentConf in Austria. I got to hear from some awesome talks from some of the coolest people in the industry and learned so much about areas of tech that I wouldn't usually be exposed to.
March 27, 2020
I created a web based News app using native web-components. I explored the concept of loading content gracefully that makes loading as painless as possible.
May 27, 2019
Something that has grabbed my interest for a long time is the concept of Progressive Web Apps (PWA). I created a Todo list app that works offline and updates the server when it comes back online.
April 28, 2019
As you can probably tell from my latests posts I have jumped straight into accessibility in tech. Surprisingly, I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about web accessibility or software accessibility in general. To me its a can of worms that I have really wanted to open but I know once I open it I won't be able to close it again. I might be totally wrong but I have a feeling that this might be the mentality of lots of web developers.
March 2, 2019
This month I wanted to talk about my favourite applications of tech, communication and assistive tech in general. I'm not talking about messaging platforms or other ways tech enhances our day to do communication but rather how tech can be used to give people a voice who struggle to communicate in a 'traditional' way. The classic example of this is Steven Hawkings who would used an eye control system to verbalise what he wanted to say. I often think his communication was misrepresented, when you saw him on TV talking about his latest research he wasn't using his communication aid in real time. He would have had to take a long time inputting what he wanted to say, not to mention his super unique setup. General purpose communication devices aren't going to be intended for someone to use long scientific words that he needs on a daily basis, luckily he had the means to have one adapted for his needs.
January 27, 2019
Tis the season, for having fun learning about tech again. Seriously though, first semester was a bit grim and I had to spend a lot of time learning in great detail about areas of computing that I'm not interested. On the bright side it made me learn things that I never would have chosen to. In contrast I spent most of December just doing anything that I found interesting or excited.
December 30, 2018
Next up was a pretty amazing trip to Helsinki to take part in Hack Junction with the troops. Hack Junction is the biggest hackathon in Europe so we thought that it was the best place to go in our final year of attending hackathons. We took on a data challenge set by Ericsson in the 'signalling heros' challenge. In this challenge we were given a bunch of data collected by an Ericsson tower and we were told to create a pipeline that could detect SS7 attacks. Practically, this meant trying to get a machine learning model that could detect anomaly in streams of data. As well as this we had to create a tool that could take PCAP files and parse them into the format we needed.
November 30, 2018
First up is the Hackathon put on by Glasgow Uni Tech Society (GUTS) which I went along to with 5 friends. Its the second time we have been along to GUTS and they really do put on one of the best Hackathons I've been to. We took on a challenge given by SAS, a data analysis company. They gave a very general brief for their challenge which was to create a platform to analyse audio data in real time. We came up with varying ideas but we landed on the idea of analysing calls in order to improve the quality of interactions with people in call centers.
October 30, 2018
In this post I set out to become the worlds best ethical hacker. Unfortunately I didn't achieve this goal. However, I did come away with a huge respect for the information security sector as well as a want to become part of it.
October 4, 2018
How I created a GraphQL API for for the data.police.uk data and exposed the data to users using a map.
September 3, 2018
