Alumni blogs

This post is a continuation of my earlier ‘Clojure at a Bank’ posts. I’ve since left the bank and am working for a large newspaper company, fortunately for me still writing Clojure.

It’s an obvious point to make, that different projects can have very different testing demands. At the bank we managed a throughput of financial products so it was critical that we got no surprises. Prod deployments were often like moon-landings, staged well in advance with lots of people in mission control.

At the newspaper it’s a bit different. Whilst bugs are still not to be warmly…

Amazon’s web services have made rebuilding uSwitch.com so much easier. We’re gradually moving more and more static assets to CloudFront (although most visitors are in the UK responses have much lower latencies than direct from S3 or even our own nginx servers). CloudFront doesn't support serving gzip'ed content direct from S3 out of the box.

Because of this, up until last week we were serving uncompressed assets, at least anything that wasn’t already compressed (such as images). Last week we put together a simple static assets nginx server to help compress things.

Whilst doing the work for uSwitch.com…

Earlier in the year, myself and some colleagues started working on building better data processing tools for uSwitch.com. Part of the theory/reflection of this is captured in a presentation I was privileged to give at EuroClojure (titled Users as Data).

In the last few days, our data team (Thibaut, Paul and I) have been playing around with some of the data we collect and using it to build some classifiers. Precision and Recall provide quantitative measures but reading through Machine Learning for Hackers showed some nice ways to visualise results.

Binary Classifier

Our…

When I read the transcript of Linus Torvald’s talk on Git at Google I was working at an investment bank in London and it was about 4 years ago. It was just as I’d started using GitHub for hosting my own side-projects and for doing some open-source work. Fast forward to today and I’ve just read an article about the fast rise of GitHub as the software repository of choice for open-source development and an interesting space for Enterprise hosting.

All the banks I worked in were extremely centrally controlled: you’d use approved libraries and tools only. However, the…

I was doing some work with a colleague earlier this week which involved connecting to an internal RabbitMQ broker and transforming some messages before forwarding them to our Kafka broker.

We’re using langohr to connect to RabbitMQ. Its consumer and queue documentation shows how to use the subscribe function to connect to a broker and print messages that arrive:

The example above is pretty close to what we started working with earlier today. It’s also quite similar to a lot of other code I’ve written in the past: connect to a broker or service and provide a…