After four years of university, you’d think I’d have this whole research thing down. However, I must admit that in my somewhat limited university experience of writing essays (us scientists tended to prefer the Greek alphabet), most of my “research” was done after the fact. I would spend the last day before a deadline frantically […]

I’m Jonathan and I’ve just joined endjin as an Apprentice Software Engineer, I have been hacking together Java since I was 15 and recently completed my degree in Computer Science from the University of Lincoln. I’m using this blog to introduce myself and to allow others to see what it was like to join endjin, […]

Not coming from a background in computer science, the inner workings of a computer have always been somewhat of a mystery to me. This is something I’ve always meant to remedy but never quite gotten around to. When I transitioned from C++ to C# my main thought surrounding memory management was “well thank god I […]

I’m back! Hi everyone. It’s been a long while since my last blog. *Bows head in shame* Blogging is one of those things I know I should do more often, but I’m still not in the routine in which one needs to be in order to do it regularly. As a consequence, what usually happens […]

Recently, Jess and I were looking at a Power BI report we produced for one of our clients. On the ‘overview’ page, we have numerous high-level visuals: Total Sales, Previous Year Sales, % Change YoY etc. Something struck me as odd, though. As I’m sure many of you who have spent days on a report […]

It’s been a pretty big week for me in a lot of ways, I’ve moved halfway across the country, started a “new” job, and used my brain for the first time in about six months. But I am so excited to be able to say that I have started back, on a permanent basis, with […]

In my previous post I documented a technical spike I carried out to see how I could take the OpenAPI.NET SDK and create a Custom Tool in Visual Studio, in particular a Single-File Generator, that could be used to improve the Azure Functions v1 local development experience. Since then the OpenAPI.NET SDK reached v1.0 and while I was […]

How did I end up here? On 16th April this year I started a new stage in my career by joining endjin. In one way, it’s been a couple of months in the making, but in another it’s been more like 8 years! Back in 2010 myself, Howard van Rooijen (one of endjin’s founders) and […]

Building RESTful APIs is a common activity at endjin. If you’ve seen our API Maturity Matrix, you’ll realise that we spend quite a lot of time thinking about the strategy, governance, legal, commercial, and operational side of building APIs along with the standard concerns of design, development, quality, infrastructure and support. One of the most […]

While you cannot yet use SpecFlow with netcore or netstandard projects, you can use new-style (dotnet) test projects that target net461, and reference netstandard projects-under-test from there. We like to use XUnit as the underlying test provider in this scenario, and we do the following: Install the current SpecFlow VS 2017 extension into VS 2017 […]

Hello everyone. Before Christmas I played around with SQL Server 2017’s inline Python integration capability. This capability was announced early last year, with the corresponding integration with R already being possible for a number of months. The main benefits from this are the abilities to: Eliminate data movement (having to transfer data samples from a database to […]

Hello again, everyone. For those who read my blog a couple of months ago, you may well have been expecting to hear from me a little sooner. Well – I was hoping that would be the case, but it turns out my body had other ideas. I was off for 8 weeks after my appendix […]

One of the great benefits of Azure (and the Cloud in general) is the simplicity with which you can create and scale resources. The downside to this is that you can easily lose track what you’ve got deployed, or accidentally create expensive items and leave them running. We wanted a way to track our spending […]

We’re very excited to announce that at Future Decoded on 01 November from 11:30 – 12:30 in L3 – Session Room 11, we’re going to be sharing our experiences with Cosmos DB! Co-presenting with Microsoft’s Phil Harvey, endjin’s Director of Engineering, James Broome and Engineer Mike Larah are going to provide an overview of Cosmos […]

Over the last few week’s I’ve been catching up on my reading backlog and serendipity meant that I read Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action” which was published in 2009, shortly followed by Satya Nadella’s “Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future […]

A little over 10 months ago I wrote a blog which reflected on my summer internship at endjin. Now, a little over 10 months later, I’m sitting in the same office one month into my Software Engineer Apprenticeship after having completed my Maths degree and choosing to come and join the team here, for good. […]

The diversification of .NET technologies – from Windows Desktop Applications using WPF and WinForms, UWP, ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core, “portable” libraries, the various flavours of .NET Standard, .NET Core (and portable executables on MacOS and Linux) – have brought with them incompatibilities, and a huge problem with older (but well-used) libraries that aren’t built for […]

Digital Transformation is the buzzword of the moment; organisations are trying to reconfigure themselves to operate in the digital age. One of the key enablement strategies involves putting APIs at the heart of the organisation to centralise access to data, logic and value, while removing those traditional barriers that prevent collaboration between organisational silos. APIs […]

This week I received an email from someone who asked how they could use our free Thought Leadership content to help their organisation move to the cloud. I realised that although we’ve released a lot of content, we’d never talked publicly about the rationale behind them and how they are all interconnected. Our Thought Leadership […]

A couple of years ago we put together the Azure Tech Selector – a handy poster which walks you through the technology choices you can make for common cloud workloads. Now, two years later, the number of services provided in the Azure ecosystem has multiplied (and the types of workload have become more sophisticated). Revisiting […]