Author: George Lambert

What is the Linux File System? — Learning at Lambert Labs #3

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Welcome to another Learning at Lambert Labs session. Every week, we release videos, presented by our developers, giving quick lectures on a chosen topic in technology.

This week’s presenter is Aaron Elijah and his session is an introduction to the Linux File System and how knowing your way round can make you a better developer. See the video below.

All demonstrations were done in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

In Today’s Learning Session:

  • Motivation for study (use in Docker, learn more about hardware-software integration, applies to MacOS).
  • Posix-compliant vs. ‘Unix-like’.
  • Showcase diagram of a typical Linux File System.
  • /boot partition and typical booting process
  • /bin directory and symlinks
  • /dev directory and demonstration with USB device
  • /etc directory and comparison of /etc/ssh vs ~/.ssh
  • /var directory and use in Docker for finding log files
  • /usr directory, its origin and why many there are many symlinks from /bin and /lib
  • /opt directory for manually installed, self-contained software from vendors
  • Where to find more information.
  • Quick Q&A from our developers

📖 Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12xKKnwirNkEzcMRhRkRUruEMeSt9OpYiYYgknZBAAU0/edit?usp=sharing

🔊 Subscribe to our channel for weekly learning sessions! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi7G5sY0IWqSNUMnRptuJmw

Our engagement aims to be conversational and developers are encouraged to ask questions to expand on the ideas that they heard. Each presenter has the freedom to choose whatever topic they wish, as long as it is within a genre of technology or computer science. We are a Python development agency at heart, but that doesn’t stop us showing off our strong computer literacy and broad technical knowledge!

What is Web Assembly? — Learning at Lambert Labs #2

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Welcome to the second Learning at Lambert Labs session. Every week, we release videos, presented by our developers, giving quick lectures on a chosen topic in technology.

This week’s presenter is Ramin Tawab and his session is an introduction to WebAssembly and how we can use it to embed non-JavaScript code in web applications. See the video below.

In Today’s Learning Session:

  • Issues in JavaScript (different implementations, inherently slow, forced to use JS ecosystem on the web)
  • Introduce WebAssembly as the solution
  • WebAssembly under the hood (data types and stack-based VM)
  • Demonstration
  • Famous use-case (AutoCAD Browser)
  • Pyiodide: Python on the web
  • Containers vs. WebAssembly VM.
  • Future: removing JS glue code, WASI, …
  • Q&A from our developers

📖 Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17sANSHbF6HCwq1spJK8f5QfrjVF7Zg6aXFaEp7o8O9s/edit?usp=sharing​

🔊 Subscribe to our channel for weekly learning sessions! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi7G5sY0IWqSNUMnRptuJmw

Our engagement aims to be conversational and developers are encouraged to ask questions to expand on the ideas that they heard. Each presenter has the freedom to choose whatever topic they wish, as long as it is within a genre of technology or computer science. We are a Python development agency at heart, but that doesn’t stop us showing off our strong computer literacy and broad technical knowledge!

What is a K-Map? — Learning at Lambert Labs #1

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Welcome to the first Learning at Lambert Labs session. Every week, we release videos, presented by our developers, giving quick lectures on a chosen topic in technology. Our engagement aims to be conversational and developers are encouraged to ask questions to expand on the ideas that they heard. Each presenter has the freedom to choose whatever topic they wish, as long as it is within a genre of technology or computer science. We are a Python development agency at heart, but that doesn’t stop us showing off our strong computer literacy and broad technical knowledge!

In this week’s video, Tom Kobialka, one of our senior developers, takes us through the basics of circuit design and how a Karnaugh map (or K-Map) can be used to simplify the combinatorial logic of a seven-segment display.

In Today’s Learning Session:

  • Introduction to Circuit design
  • Seven-segment displays
  • Combinatorial logic
  • K-Map simplification
  • Q&A from our developers

🤖 Circuit Design: https://simulator.io/board/B4EMPsoRWh/2

📖 Slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XeQ1UO9cxSSCsGaoJbfTI6CgrqH4n9SO/view?usp=sharing

🔊 Subscribe to our channel for weekly learning sessions! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi7G5sY0IWqSNUMnRptuJmw

Lambert Labs named as one of Top B2B Firms for software development in Britain by Clutch

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Lambert Labs Clutch

We’ve been recognised by Clutch as one the Top B2B Firms for software development in Britain!

Clutch is an independent B2B review and ratings platform. Various past and present clients of Lambert Labs have been kind enough to give us outstanding reviews during 2020 and we’re pleased that this has led to us receiving this award.

To find out more about our previous projects and reviews check our Clutch profile. And if you want to get in touch for help with your software development then get in contact with us.

Lambert Labs becomes an AWS Select partner

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We are pleased to announce that Lambert Labs is now an AWS Partner Network Select Consulting Partner. We have been using Amazon Web Services for over 3 years and now manage more than 15 AWS accounts for clients across a broad range of industries.

We have met stringent requirements in order to become AWS Select partners. Our AWS expertise includes holding more than 10 AWS Accreditations, made up of AWS Business Professional and AWS Technical Professional qualifications, and we have an ever-increasing number of AWS Associate Certification-holders among our ranks.

Our experience across the AWS offering is broad. It includes, but is not limited to:

  • Deploying web applications using AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS EC2
  • Managing databases/data warehouses with AWS RDS, Amazon DocumentDB, AWS DynamoDB and Amazon Redshift
  • Implementing serverless applications with AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway
  • Using AWS CloudFormation to automate the creation and management of technology stacks on AWS
  • Using AWS Elastic Container Registry and Elastic Container Service to deploy and managed container based applications

You can view Lambert Labs’ profile on the AWS Partner Solutions Finder.

Lambert Labs selected to take part in the London & Partners Business Growth Programme

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We are thrilled to announce that Lambert Labs has been chosen to take part in the London & Partners Business Growth Programme. During the programme we will have the opportunity to network (virtually!) with large corporates headquartered in London and will have access to business growth advisers that will help Lambert Labs continue its upwards trajectory.

business growth programme

There are five different work streams in the Business Growth Programme:

  • advancing business plans
  • prioritising and engaging audiences
  • raising funds and finance
  • accelerating sales
  • developing people strategies

We are particularly looking forward to focusing our time on the programme in the ‘prioritising and engaging audiences’ and ‘accelerating sales’ work streams.

George Lambert features on Startup Secrets Podcast

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Our founder George Lambert recently featured on the Startup Secrets Podcast where he spoke to host Seb Francis and gave insights into our company’s journey and provided tips for aspiring entrepreneurs. In the podcast George discusses the trials and tribulations of starting and growing a business from scratch. You can listen to the episode here. 

The Startup Secrets Podcast is a podcast for entrepreneurs, set to inspire, educate and motivate new businesses to success. 

Startup Secrets works in association with Accounts Lab, a cloud accountancy firm who specialise in startups and growth businesses across all sectors. 

With episodes released weekly, you can subscribe on itunes or follow on Spotify to never miss an episode.

Pair Programming at Lambert Labs

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Pair Programming at Lambert Labs

Gone are the days of ‘traditional’ programming practices, where teams of software developers might have restricted their communciation to once weekly meetings and worked towards yearly release dates; we are now accustomed to a far more iterative process: daily standups, TDD and continuous integration and/or deployment. This iterative process is of course part of the wider set of agile programming practices.

At Lambert Labs we take our agile programming practices seriously. As part of this we regularly use pair programming as a way to ensure that we are working efficiently and effectively as possible.

Pair Programming Workstation Setup

The workstation setup for pair programming is important. If two developers are around one workstation for significant periods of time, they might get uncomfortable. This is why we use ‘dual workstations’ for our pair programming. Our dual workstations are made up of two desks and four monitors, but only one computer – the two monitors on the desk with the computer are duplicated to the two monitors on the desk without the computer. This means that both developers can sit in comfort while pair programming!

Setting up our workstations requires HDMI splitters (we use something like this). Our current desk of choice is the IKEA Skarska Standing Desk.

The Good

Code exposure: pair programming helps developers of all levels of seniority get exposure to different parts of the codebase. This is really important because it helps developers understand the overall system that they are working on and also helps provide continuity when a developer with ownership of a section of the codebase is on holiday or otherwise engaged.

Code quality: if two developers are looking at the same piece of code during development then this is similar to having an extremely thorough review process (think how often a reviewer spends as long reviewing code as the developer spent writing it – very rarely!).

Focus: yes, pair programmers might have a chat and a giggle, but what they won’t do is things like check social media, check their emails and surf the net. In this case, working together brings more productivity.

Morale: working together is fun, and it boosts morale! The life of a developer can at times be unneccesarily quiet. Pair programming discourages deathly silences and encourages collaboration.

Fewer bugs: working as a pair means that fewer bugs creep into the code base. This reduces time spent debugging at a later stage.

The Bad

Lack of ownership: developers don’t always feel that they have ownership of a section of the codebase, and feel as though they are getting pulled in multiple directions.

The Ugly

Lack of synergy: if two developers don’t ‘click’ when they are working together then the relationship might not be productive – in some cases this is just human nature!

At Lambert Labs we find that the benefits of pair programming hugely outweigh the drawbacks. It improves our productivity and standards, and we will stick with it moving forwards 🙂

How to integrate Jira with GitHub

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At Lambert Labs we work with a range of clients across different sectors. What can be awkward is that they often use completely different DevOps and project management tools. On the DevOps side, some clients use AWS while others prefer Google Cloud Platform or even PaaS providers such as Heroku. Some clients use CircleCI while others prefer to use Travis/Jenkins. From the project management perspective Jira and Confluence are very popular, but a selection of our smaller projects still make use of Trello.

As a software development agency it is important for us to be expert users of as many of these project management tools as possible because it enables us to work on a broader range of projects. We recently started working on a project with a client that uses GitHub for code hosting and Jira for issue tracking. Integrating Jira with GitHub makes it easier for our project managers and software engineers to keep track of the GitHub branches and pull requests that correspond to tickets in Jira. The benefits of integration are shown in the example Jira ticket below, where there are links to a GitHub branch and pull request in the development section (these appear automatically as part of the integration).

A Jira issue demonstrating a GitHub integration
A Jira issue demonstrating a GitHub integration

Integration

Prerequisites

  • A Jira account with administration rights
  • A personal GitHub account, or a GitHub organisation account with administration rights

Setting up GitHub

First, navigate to your GitHub account settings page (if you navigate to your personal settings, this will eventually give Jira access to your personal repositories. If you navigate to your organisation settings, this will eventually give Jira access to your organisation’s repositories). Go to ‘Developer Settings -> OAuth Apps -> New OAuth App’. You will be presented with the following page:

GitHub register OAuth application
Page demonstrating how to GitHub register OAuth application

Fill in the following details and click on ‘Register Application’:

After clicking on ‘Register Application’ you will be taken through to a confirmation page giving you a Client ID an Client Secret. Make a note of these – you will need them in a moment.

Setting up Jira

Now navigate to your organisation’s dashboard on Jira and go to ‘Settings -> Applications -> DVCS Accounts -> ‘Link GitHub Account’. You will be prompted with the following popup:

Adding a GitHub account to Jira
Adding a GitHub account to Jira

Choose either GitHub or Github Enterprise as your host (depending on what is appropriate) and put either your GitHub username or GitHub organisation name as the ‘Team or User Account’ (again, depending on what is appropriate). Client ID and Client Secret should be self explanatory! After you click ‘Add’ you will be prompted by an authorisation page (you should authorise the app, and may be required to enter your password as part of this process). You will then be redirected to the DVCS accounts page in Jira, where you should now see your linked GitHub account.

The last step is to understand how to make sure your GitHub branches and pull requests appear in the corresponding Jira tickets. To ensure the link takes place, you must name your Git(Hub) branches as ‘<JiraProjectKey>-<Jira-Issue-Number>-normal-git-branch-name’. You can find your Jira Project Key (on a per project basis) by going to a Jira project and navigating to settings. You will see a details page similar to the following:

Jira project details page
Jira project details page

So, for the above Jira project, an example branch name would be ‘LMS-5-my-new-feature’. As soon as you follow this naming convention for your branches you will see branches and pull requests appearing in your Jira tickets. Nice!