My final year as a software engineering apprentice at endjin

This month, I’ve completed my three year apprenticeship at endjin – a big landmark in a journey that started with enrolling on a computing MSc several years ago. Endjin’s apprenticeship is a custom programme which aims to bridge the gap between new entrant and competent developer. The scheme was set up in recognition of the value of mentoring and practical...

Feb 2017

Amazingly Useful Chrome Developer Tips: #1 Inspecting dynamically created DOM elements

I recently needed to style a dropdown menu which was part of a set of elements inserted into the DOM by a third party JavaScript library (CK Editor) when another element was clicked. To style the dropdown, I needed to have a look at the DOM elements for the dropdown. However, this was tricky because they weren’t present when the page loaded. The usual...

Jan 2017

Creating a PowerBI report with DirectQuery and multiple SQL Database sources using Elastic Query

This post explains how to create a PowerBI report which sources data from two separate Azure SQL Databases. PowerBI offers two data access mechanisms; Import and DirectQuery. DirectQuery provides a range of benefits, the chief of which is that data is automatically refreshed. DirectQuery doesn’t import any data into PowerBI, instead it queries the...

Jan 2017

Year 2 as a software engineering apprentice at endjin

In February 2016, I completed my second year of endjin’s three year custom apprenticeship scheme. This blog is a chance for me to reflect on what was learnt over the year – hopefully others will find it useful too. Year one had involved a very steep learning curve as I transitioned from student to graduate to real world apprentice, and learned about...

Mar 2016

Azure Machine Learning–experimenting with training data proportions using the SMOTE module

A short while ago, I was trying to classify some data using Azure Machine Learning, but the training data was very imbalanced. In the attempt to build a useful model from this data, I came across the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), an approach to dealing with imbalanced training data. This blog describes what I learnt. First, I’ll...

Sep 2015

Azure data services part 3: Azure Machine Learning

In parts 1 and 2 of this mini-series, I wrote brief intros to HDInsight and Stream Insight, Azure’s offerings for big data analytics and real-time analytics. Next up, Azure Machine Learning. What it’s for: Azure Machine learning provides a GUI with drag and drop pre-built components for carrying out predictive analytics. You can also plug in custom...

Jun 2015

Azure data services part 2: Stream Insight

This blog is part of a series where I’m writing up my notes from a training session on Azure’s data services. The previous post dealt with Azure’s Hadoop implementation, HDInsight. This week, I’m going to write about Stream Insight. What it’s for: Stream Insight is an Azure service for real-time event processing. Use cases for Stream Insight would...

Jun 2015

Azure data services part 1: HDInsight

Last Autumn, Richard Kerslake and I were lucky enough to land in the warmth of Barcelona, for a Microsoft Analytics training event. The sessions gave an introduction to Azure’s HDInsight, Stream Analytics and Machine Learning services. I’m going to write up a quick summary of what I learned about each service, starting with HDInsight.What it’s for: HDInsight...

Jun 2015

Visualise your Azure Table Storage data with Power BI

With Power BI now in public preview everywhere, you don’t need to be a “data scientist” to do data science! Power BI is a powerful tool for visualising performance, user interactions and other data for your applications. There is so much useful data sitting passively in various storage accounts, hiding interesting trends or unwanted behaviour. Power...

Apr 2015

Using Git for .NET development part 5 – staging some changes in a file but not others

I sometimes find myself in a situation where I want to include some, but not all changes in a file in a Git commit. For example, a colleague uses Visual Studio 2015, whereas I use 2013, so when I open a solution to help out on their project, the .sln file is updated to show my version of Visual Studio. I don’t want to check this in, but I do want to...

Mar 2015