Cloud
A quick guide to implementing a test framework for IAM permissions using the AWS IAM Policy Simulator API and a tiny hack.
Artificial Intelligence
Poor AI implementation can reduce motivation and identity—hindering business performance and employee wellbeing. Here’s why your AI strategy needs a human touch.
Delivery
When it comes to legacy modernisation projects, there’s a kind of rework – let’s call it ‘cultural rework’ – that organisations often seem to accept as an inevitable part of their investment. In this blog post, I look at some of the main cultural, team and human challenges that arise on legacy modernisation projects, and how they can be tackled.
Tech
I have recently come off my first client project, which I was part of for 9 months, and so I wanted to reflect on everything that I learnt during that time.
Testing
Testing an event ingestion service is critical for ensuring reliable, scalable event-driven architectures. This blog dives into our approach to testing an ingestion service integrated with Azure Event Hubs, covering the testing strategy, tools, and process flow, with a detailed diagram to illustrate the pipeline.
Artificial Intelligence
After building a React application with three AI assistants, our developer discovered that extracting your conversation history afterwards is like trying to collect debts in a frontier town: ChatGPT eventually pays up after some serious negotiation, Claude charms you while keeping the vault locked, and Copilot confidently hands you a treasure map to gold buried on someone else's land. The lesson? These AI partners can help you build impressive applications but somehow can't easily tell you what you discussed last Tuesday, so document as you go or risk spending more time archaeological than architectural.
Tech
After two decades of working with highly regulated organisations, we've developed some strong opinions about legacy systems some of which run counter to prevailing industry narratives. Whilst other consultancies and vendors push their "proven frameworks" and "transformational roadmaps," we've watched well-intentioned modernisation initiatives stumble over the same fundamental misunderstandings about what legacy systems actually are and why they persist. This blog covers what we've learned about the uncomfortable realities that these frameworks rarely address.
Artificial Intelligence
In this instalment, I discovered that Cursor IDE transformed my chaotic multi-AI orchestra of wayward soloists into something rather more like a proper piano duet, successfully refactoring my 847-line monolith into modular components without the usual algorithmic amnesia. I found that when your IDE becomes your coding partner, you stop waving the baton at three separate musicians who occasionally abandon the sheet music for their own creative interpretations and start playing chamber music, even when you accidentally set fire to the entire score and your duet partner rescues the concert from almost certain disaster by magically producing a fresh copy from the archives.
Artificial Intelligence
A non-React developer built a trade lifecycle simulation using three AI assistants as his coding team, discovering that managing AI agents is rather like conducting an orchestra where each musician excels at different parts of the piece but occasionally abandons the score for a spot of impromptu improvisation. The project demonstrated that whilst AI collaboration can be very useful, someone still needs to wave the baton when your string section decides to have a go at bebop when they should be playing Beethoven.
Sustainability
Scott Logic created the Technology Carbon Standard Schema, an open-source tool that helps companies measure and share their digital carbon emissions data. With the ICT sector consuming 4% of global electricity, most organisations lack standardised ways to track their technology-related carbon footprint. The schema provides a structured format for measuring and exchanging this data between companies.
People
Having just completed the Graduate Training at Scott Logic, I wanted to reflect on the last three months and offer some advice to those who may be taking part in the future.
People
Practical insights of adapting agile methodologies to empower people. Spanning the topics of Mixed Martial Arts, decision-making and creativity.
Artificial Intelligence
A year after predicting GenAI's sustainability crisis, the 2024/25 financial data tells a concerning story. OpenAI's $10 billion revenue comes with $5 billion losses, whilst Anthropic burns $3-4 billion annually. With the sector consuming over $100 billion in venture funding and Big Tech spending $250 billion on AI infrastructure, we're witnessing what some critics are now calling a "subprime AI crisis" – an entire industry built on services sold at massive losses. The transparency initiatives from Hugging Face's AI Energy Score and the shift towards open source models (now 46% of enterprise preference) offer hope for a more sustainable GenAI 2.0 focused on efficiency over scale.
Podcast
In this episode of Beyond the Hype, Oliver Cronk is joined by Ani Allen from OutSystems and Ryan Grey from Marra to explore the spectrum from No-Code, through Low-Code, to High- (or Pro-?) Code, and consider how AI is reshaping the development experience.
People
Last year, I received a combined autism and ADHD (AuDHD) diagnosis. It was a pivotal moment that helped me reframe my life, and I decided early on to be open about my diagnosis, both to advocate for myself and to let others know they’re not alone.
Data Engineering
Data enables faster and more accurate due diligence, informs operational transformation post-acquisition, and supports more effective positioning when it comes time to exit. This post outlines the role of data across each of these key stages.
Testing
If you’re working on an entirely new product with no dependencies on any existing system, you’re free to decide how best to build, test and deploy the product. However, if you’re modernising a legacy system, the approach to development and testing is less straightforward. In this blog post, I look at some of the key considerations that should inform the test strategy for a modernisation project. I also explain why it’s important to go beyond the hype and use the right tool for the right job at the right time.
Delivery
On the route to delivering and realising value, the aim is to reduce the number of twists and turns in the software development pipework and improve flow. In this blog post, I’ll share some insights into practices and processes that reduce flow and what you can do to improve flow. It’s important to point out this is purposefully methodology-agnostic; I want to get beyond the rituals and practices of the different approaches and focus instead on the underlying best practices.
People
Pride Month is both a joyful celebration and a powerful protest — a moment to honour how far we’ve come, and to spotlight how far we still have to go. But every year, as the corporate logos change their colours and the parades grow ever larger, the same question resurfaces: Do we still need Pride? The answer is a resounding yes. In this post, I explain why.
