How do you choose out of the thousands of languages and does it really matter what you pick?
It’s a problem anyone who’s started a new programming project is familiar with. Which language do you use? You don’t want to realize months down the line that choosing something else would’ve made your code less buggy, easier to maintain, or allow you to just import a module to fix…
Can you tell when whose talking to who?
Within one Slack Channel, multiple different conversations might overlap with each other. Whilst it’s normally simple for a human reader to pull them apart this is non-trivial for a computer to do. This places an obstacle in the path of automatically analyzing text that comes from Slack. …
5 members of the LBGT community who have made major contributions to Computing
The LGBT community has made and continues to make great contributions to Computing. However, these are often overlooked due to prejudice or closetedness. …
Was bad software engineering responsible for gaming’s latest disaster
Video Games are still sold in dedicated brick-and-mortar stores, their production often looks more similar to a film, and developers eschew some best practices from the rest of software engineering. However, game developers do make software; software worth $165B in worldwide revenue [1]. Whilst industry reviewers often discuss products in…
What’s going to stop you from making the most of the Microservices architecture
Gone are the days of the monolithic application! Microservices are today’s architecture of choice. Instead of one big app, a network of independently deployable small services works together to provide functionality. …
How much has changed in 40 years?
A customer of my dad recently gave him this copy of ‘Computer Weekly’ from 1976. Knowing that I was studying for a computing degree he thought I might find it interesting to see what the field was like over 40 years ago. Some digging revealed that ‘Computer Weekly’ was a…
Is there any reason to not work in the cloud?
Cloud computing is incredibly and increasingly popular. Tech giants Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all offer cloud services to both millions of individual users and large companies like Netflix, Linkedin, and Twitch. The cloud market is worth an estimated $321 Billion and it shows no sign of slowing down. …
Sometimes just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
NFTs are making a big splash in the tech world. Most of the hubbub has been about the sale of digital art. However, while researching an article I wrote on how NFTs work, I found loads of more ‘out-there’ uses for the tech.
Exchanged at a wedding
6 book recommendations that deal with themes of right and wrong in computing and software engineering.
The Software and Hardware I learned about during my degree is inside prison-sentence recommendation algorithms, self-guided missiles, and self-driving cars and yet very little time was devoted to discussing ethics. Instead, I explored right and wrong in my field through some extra-curricular reading. …
How I used Python to quickly built an interactive and stylish dashboard to analyze who says what in the original Star Wars Trilogy
Streamlit is a python library used to quickly build interactive dashboards for the web. The gallery of dashboards on the Streamlit website shows them being used for science communication, data analysis, and displaying machine learning models in action. I opted for a less serious topic to teach myself how to…
