Blog

Our thoughts on technology and design

Artificial Intelligence
As we keep on building the InferGPT chatbot, the task of crafting prompts is one that our team is experimenting with. In this blog I'll explore some of the challenges of prompt engineering from a Linguistics angle.
Open Source
It seems barely a month goes by without a new supply chain attack making the headlines, and malicious code in dependency packages from package managers such as NPM is a common method. My usual sentiments include “oh another one, what a surprise”, before thoughts eventually turn to - someone *really* ought to be doing something about this. Fortunately, it turns out that quite a few things are indeed being done - there's progress, activity, and promising ideas for the future. The outlook is brighter than what we might have assumed.
Podcast
In this episode, I'm joined by Doro Hinrichs and Kira Clark from Scott Logic and Peter Gostev, Head of AI at Moonpig. Together, we explore whether we can ever really trust and secure Generative AI – and what impact this will have on product and service design – before offering pragmatic advice on what organisations can do to navigate this terrain.
Cloud
The impending Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) aims to strengthen the IT security of financial entities such as banks, insurance companies and investment firms across Europe. The Bank of England launched an equivalent 'Operational Resilience' regime in March 2022. In this blog post, I share Monzo's smart, modern resilience strategy and look at why traditional resilience strategies put organisations at significant risk.
Delivery
Are story points just a waste of time? In this post, I take a critical look at the common practice of story pointing tickets, examining their origins and how they are most commonly used. I argue that story points often cause more harm than good and that maybe you don't need them at all.
Artificial Intelligence
In this blog, I describe creating InferGPT, a personalized chatbot, using Python, FastAPI, and React without the use of LangChain. Our backend handles complex queries with a multi-agent system and Neo4j database, aiming to provide tailored responses.
Sustainability
The Cloud Carbon Footprint tool also provides support for carbon calculations from On-Premise sources. I investigate how it works and list some pros and cons with its usage, along with some contributions we are hoping to make.
People
In agile teams the development team often has some, if not total control over the process of developing software. In this article I'll look at why I believe that's important and why I think we should care, and care passionately about the processes we use to develop software.
Delivery
In the past few years, we’ve seen a return to the large-scale technology procurement approach that the Government Digital Service was explicitly set up to tackle. We learned lessons from the past back in 2011 – and if we don't continue to learn from the past, we're doomed to repeat it. As I explain in this blog post, there is a better way forward – one in which we focus on bold and better GovTech, not 'Big IT'.
Podcast
In this episode, Oliver Cronk and David Rees from Scott Logic are joined by Hannah Smith, Director of Operations at Green Web Foundation, to explore the potential benefits and limitations of ‘carbon aware’ computing. With global emissions from cloud computing exceeding those from commercial flights, is 'carbon aware' a distraction from getting to grips with the scale of the challenge we face?
People
Pride is a celebration centred in the LGBTQ community, and many corporations use it to show their solidarity. This can sometimes feel more like a performative rainbow-washing stance than anything meaningful. At Scott Logic we try to ensure that, day to day, we are always carrying out meaningful actions to promote inclusivity, and to make sure all our colleagues and clients know we truly believe in this.
Tech
A developer takes a dive into the lands of legislation. What is the EAA and what does it mean for me and my company?
People
Embracing diversity and inclusion in workplaces is akin to using a multitude of colourful crayons to create vibrant and innovative solutions. In the dynamic realm of IT consultancy, diverse teams not only outperform homogeneous ones but also drive transformative change, making diversity and inclusion indispensable for success and industry leadership.
Artificial Intelligence
This blog series reports on our R&D project exploring the potential of LLMs to enhance accessibility testing.
Tech
A (belated) festive look at the latest challenger to Node.js's throne
Tech
The increase of in-car instrumentation over the years has opened up the opportunity to use this data as an input into weather modelling. Are we all driving around in mystic minivans and clairvoyant coupés?
Tech
Everyone loves CSS! Continuing in my obsession, I have created a tictactoe game, with an option to have a CPU that plays randomly. This was made without any JavaScript, only HTML and CSS. In this blog post I discuss how I made it
Artificial Intelligence
This blog demonstrates how to generate graph database queries using a large language model. This allows users to ask natural language questions in order to understand their data presented in a knowledge graph better! This can be done without extensive understanding of the querying language.
Artificial Intelligence
Exploring LangGraph and its applications in the context of multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) applications.
Podcast
In this episode, I'm joined by Jess McEvoy and Peter Chamberlin for a discussion about the UK government’s approach to addressing AI challenges with its pro-innovation mantra, and whether this creates the right environment for success.

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