LShift Ltd

technology from back to front

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

In defence of breaking changes –

“Is nuance absolutely awesome, or simply rubbish?”

The news quiz, 103:2

For the purposes of this post let’s assume it’s simply rubbish.

Received wisdom is that breaking changes to supporting software (OS, libraries, s… https://t.co/MvPJJqgBIP

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Using Machine Learning to Filter the News –

In Oliver Wyman’s recent Hackathon, we choose to create a News Filtering solution. The idea was to allow users who are sensitive to certain issues to be able to read the news without stumbling upon those issue… https://t.co/S3TvcxbWKa

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Constraint-based layout for Scenic—a proof of concept –

Scenic is an Elixir UI framework intended for fixed-screen devices. In Scenic, UIs are constructed and updated by modifying a scene graph, i.e. a tree of graphical elements such as shapes, buttons … https://t.co/WyKuQDVS2f

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

NFRs Considered Harmful –

I’ll make this short: Defining Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) is dangerous. That’s the tweet.

An NFR is broadly defined as a ‘quality’ of the software, rather than what it ‘does’. So ‘the software shall add two numbers’ is… https://t.co/tOrFAN82s9

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

When does a search database become a search engine? –

Modern databases have a wealth of features to support the querying of text data. We can employ fuzzy search, proximity search, stemming and word-breaking to take natural language queries and return m… https://t.co/uWJ7HDYoFB

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

The ‘Strict Order’ and ‘Exactly-Once’ conundrums –

Message and event-based architectures have become increasingly accessible in recent years, and the big cloud providers’ managed services that abstract the infrastructure complexities away from developer… https://t.co/J39q7mSmI2

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Creating your own dynamic website –

In my previous post, I described how beginners can set up a static website. This follow-on post covers setting up a dynamic website. This is a website whose content isn’t always the same.

These are slightly harder to… https://t.co/dEat9FR2OT

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Elevation of Privileges—Making Threat Modelling Fun –

Motivation

Threat modelling is hard. There are a few reasons why this is so. One of the challenges is the fact that it’s widely accepted that in order to achieve effective threat modelling, you must… https://t.co/XAmOqhSdMD

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Asynchronous, event-driven Systems: Introductory Patterns and a Case Study –

For some reason, and probably sufficiently late to the party, I was thinking about conceptual patterns for designing an asynchronous, event-driven, distributed system the other… https://t.co/ZO8H82yyMJ

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

An introduction in A/B testing—what it is, and why it’s useful –

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing is a methodology that allows you to compare two different states of a webpage or an app to determine what performs better. It’s an experiment where two or… https://t.co/7Kn7qjp4a2

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Creating your own static website –

There are basically two types of website—static and dynamic. A static site is one, usually written in plain HTML, with unchanging content, meaning every visitor to the website will see the same thing. A dynamic site is… https://t.co/vlWxMRqulh

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

What does a second person video game look like? –

Anyone who has played video games will probably group games into two categories: first-person perspective and third-person perspective. For those who haven’t played video games, first-person perspective … https://t.co/t1fGnFSBn3

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Code review and keeping in the flow –

It’s now table stakes for team software development to be done on feature branches and reviewed using a tool such as github’s pull requests. That’s despite, in many situations, a lot of delay while unreviewed code p… https://t.co/6XIEja1ucU

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Home Energy Dashboard with Elixir and Scenic –

As of last month, I am able to poll my solar PV inverter for its current yield and other interesting data, which I would ultimately like to display using a Raspberry Pi plus touch screen.

On this home ener… https://t.co/oluUQv5lhw

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Is Conway’s law a myth? Does it still hold in today’s corporate structures? –

This blog post was originally going to be called “does corporate management structure mirror the architecture of a modern day computer?”. I began writing, and during my resear… https://t.co/AP6rXvVq6y

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Is it still worth learning vim? –

Pros and Cons

It’s the year 2020 and there are now countless ways in which you can write software. Gone are the days of monochromatic text editors and manual indenting of your code, so why is it still worth learning vi… https://t.co/WrOrHHV5F1

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

The Pragmatic Programmer –

Twenty years ago—before C# was a thing and people thought the world would fall to pieces at the turn of the millennium Andrew Hunt and David Thomas published their book, The Pragmatic Programmer. This book received a lot of at… https://t.co/eVM7A3TH7u

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

Are promises really monads? –

So, to add more… well, ‘fuel to the fire’ is the wrong term—more sticks to the pile, perhaps? More monads to the stack? Here we go:

If you DuckDuckGo “are promises monads” the first nine answers are:

Promises are the … https://t.co/BMR8heiTsO

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

munger: Scan-to-cloud for local scanners –

Despite the ongoing good work in many places to move to fully digital options, many organisations remain committed to sending you shards of dead tree through the post (particularly the NHS, though I can underst… https://t.co/MN7GYdq39g

[LShift Ltd @lshift]

How to get a 10x developer –

Long time readers will note this post as being similarly clickbait as my earlier ‘How to be a Rockstar developer!‘. Don’t worry, hopefully there’s useful information here.

(I’ve been inspired here by Keavy McKinn’s post ‘Th… https://t.co/KFHGmXWEWg