The current world situation has accelerated the steady move to more remote working for employees. Tech companies are naturally in the vanguard of this move to “remote working” or telecommuting (depending on how far away from the main office the worker is). Once an organisation has taken the leap to…

As someone who has never had to dabble with the minutiae of how a packet travels from a remote machine onto the laptop I’m currently using, the whole lifecycle of network programming is a vast sea of “unknown unknowns”. A recent change this year, in my current role at THG…

As part of the Soteria research project at THG, we needed to look at DDoS attacks, their features and how to generate the amount of traffic required to simulate an actual attack. There are few resources available for folks researching cyber attacks and DDoS attacks in general. …

When you are writing a linux application that needs either kernel to userspace communications or userspace to kernel communications, the typical answer is to use ioctl and sockets. This is a simple mechanism for sending information down from userspace into the kernel to make requests for info, or to direct…

At THG there are a variety of applications and micro-services. Some of these are more suited to run on virtual machines whilst some (particularly RESTful micro-services) are very suited to running in a container. The long and winding road In the THG WMS team, the last year has been a year of technology migration…

The WMS team transitioned away from traditional databases to use CockroachDB. The promise of a resilient cluster with horizontal scalability was a great deal — on paper. Consolidating Database Technologies Developers often think of refactoring as a purely code-driven changes — usually done at the forbearance of management…medium.com After working with CockroachDB for a while, the engineers needed to upgrade to the latest version — without disrupting warehouse operations. In theory…

Freedom We’re now allowed to travel much further than we were during the more restrictive period of the lockdown. To celebrate and to get some fresh air, we had a boys day out to the Lake District to climb Scafell Pike. …

Pubs re-open The biggest story in the UK is the re-opening of pubs (England) or beer gardens (Scotland). The goal of course is to allow some form of normalcy to return. The giant risk though is that pubs are venues designed for people to congregate and that’s precisely what we don’t want…

Overviews only Now that the daily press conferences are a thing of the past, the daily briefing slides are no longer available. However there is still a daily update to the dataset. So it seems like the number of cases and the number of admissions and also the amount of deaths per…