Alicia Sykes's Blog

Recently I developed and published an opensource web app that uses data from Twitter combined with sentiment analysis and emotion detection to create a series of data visualisations to illustrate the happy and less happy locations, topics and times.... The Final Product Live application: http://sentiment-sweep.com/ Source...

Europes biggest 40 hour non-stop hacking marathon, HackZurich 2016 had  800+ Attendees from around the globe, 500+ hackers, hundreds of submissions, and 3.6 tons of food. Big name sponsors (including Google, Kyak, Adobe, Samsung, Bosch, Microsoft and loads way more) ensured that...

On the 11th - 13th of March 2016, 200 hackers from around the world descended on St Gallen, Switzerland, for the second addition of StartHack. Sponsored by SwissCom and run as part of the START summit 2016, this 36 hour coding competition had plenty to offer. There were many awesome...

What is Unit Testing? Unit testing is where the program is broken down into a series of units, or functions, or areas - each of these is tested individually/standalone in a lot of detail. This allows us to check that each function works as it should. So if we give one of our methods/functions a set of inputs we can then verify that we get the expected output for each example. We...

What is Coverage Testing? Coverage testing determines what proportion of your source code is covered by your tests.  It's useful to be able to check this as your developing/writing tests/testing so that you can aim as close as possible for 100% How do I use Coverage Testing...

Example Project https://github.com/Lissy93/quick-example-of-testing-in-nodejs Introduction In this post we'll go through the complete process of setting up your test environment in a Node.js app, and then write a few simple unit tests. Although I've aimed this for Node apps, you...

First off, what do tests provide us with? Documentation code Catch future errors Long-term time savings - because errors have been found before anythings been deployed to production Although all the above are true, using tests like this is just a tool - not a process. What...

Setting up a new project and getting it ready for Gulp Gulp is simple to set up. Presuming you have Node.js already installed: In the command line, navigate into the root of your project working directory Install Gulp with npm install gulp --save-dev what this will do...

What is Gulp? Gulp.js is a streaming build system built on Node.js. This basically means that it can be configured to perform repetitive tasks and coding operations automatically during development. For example it can compile all your coffee scr ipt whenever your file changes, or...

Smart Depart is an app which monitors your predefined route into work, and will wake you up earlier if there are delays, ensuring your never late for meetings. Currently it is integrated with TFL, but we plan to start integrating it with National Rail, traffic and weather data too. The...

Polymer is part of the web platform team, and it officially began 3 years ago - but last week Google announced that 1.0 has been released, and ready for production. Previously building web apps across multiple platforms and form factors was really challenging, different components are...

Send a tweet to @suggest_movies and receive a personalized movie recommendation back. @suggest_movies will analyse your public tweets from your Twitter profile and use personality insights powered by IBM Watson to create a profile of your character and determine what movie genre's...