Migrating from NPM to PNPM
PNPM has been touted as a more performant and reliable replacement for NPM, aiming to reduce slow build times and eliminate issues with dependency mismatches. I primarily investigated PNPM as a way of speeding up the ...
Posts by Year
2022
Web based 3D geological model viewer
BGS’s 3D geological model viewer provides on-demand generation of images of synthetic borehole log, vertical section and horizontal slices as outputs from selected 3D geological models. These are made available throug...
Static Code Analysis with SonarQube
Static Code Analysis with SonarQube The use of static code analysis tools can help developers identify code quality issues and security vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle, and so helps in the ...
Exposing and resolving persistent identifiers on the web
What are persistent identifiers?
Speeding up ETLHelper’s API transfers with asyncio
ETLHelper is a Python library developed at BGS for reading from and writing to databases. It makes it easy to run a SQL query and transform the results into JSON objects suitable for uploading to an HTTP API.
2021
Personas in product design
Personas are representations of user groups whom we expect to use our products. They help to convey information about the users to the product team. Some products target just a single user group, but most will have mo...
Moving window operations across arrays
Applying functions using moving windows are a common feature of geospatial data analysis and often exist “under the hood” of GIS software. If you’ve ever calculated a slope or aspect grid from a raster elevation datas...
2020
Fork vs Spawn in Python Multiprocessing
I recently got stuck trying to plot multiple figures in parallel with Matplotlib. It took five hours to find a two-line fix to make it work. Afterwards I spent even more hours learning about multiprocessing in order t...
CentOS 7, Ansible and the end of Python 2
Python 2 vs 3 mismatches have been causing problems in our CentOS 7 server adminstration. We use Ansible for automatic configuration and continuous integration deployments. A few of our long-used jobs recently broke b...
Benefits of creating technical documentation using GitHub pages
There are known challenges when publishing technical documentation / reports when using PDF or other desktop office formats which is why we endeavor at the BGS to publish our documentation using HTML
2019
BGS contribution to Parse Server open-source platform
A number of BGS projects are using the open source Parse Server platform. Previously an MBaaS (mobile backend as a service) purchased by Facebook in 2013, Parse was closed in 2017 and subsequently open-sourced under ...
Experimenting with GraphQL
Some background, a development team within the BGS Informatics department were tasked with creating an API to expose sensor data (in this case sensor data from instrumentation placed within boreholes). The API to be p...
BGS 2019 Open Day activity: a taste of statistics from collecting data to making graphs
Sometimes people wonder what is behind the tables, graphs and models statisticians made. Are we playing tricks? Well, we cannot deny that we use some mathematical magic occasionally, but for most the time, it is about...
Does every project need a design system? (Part 4)
This is part 4 in a blog series about our approach to creating a shared design system for myHAZ-VCT PLATFORM.
One of many ways to create a design system (Part 3)
This is part 3 in a blog series about our approach to creating a shared design system for myHAZ-VCT PLATFORM.
Tools for creating sharing and managing design systems (Part 2)
This is part 2 in a blog series about our approach to creating a shared design system for myHAZ-VCT PLATFORM.
What are design systems? (Part 1)
This is part 1 in a blog series about our approach to creating a shared design system for myHAZ-VCT PLATFORM.
Super-charging search engine optimisation (SEO) for JavaScript through server side rendering (SSR)
Single page applications (SPAs), are a modern way to write full web based experiences for audiences. Dev ops, frontend and backend teams can all work in unison to deliver a common vision without compromising design or...
Moving code into the open
We recently released our internally-developed etlhelper tool under an open source licence. This post is a reflection on the experience, explaining what we did and why and with advice for future projects. The take-home...