Blog

In this post, Mike Larah reflects on his experiences going through the endjin three-year apprenticeship scheme

We've improved our approach for saving money by turning off our virtual machines outside of office hours. This post explored how to do it using graphical runbooks.

What do machine learning and data science actually mean? This post digs into the detail behind the endjin approach to structured experimentation, arguing that the "science" is really all about following the process, allowing you to iterate to insights quickly when there are no guarantees of success.

We have produced an insightful booklet called "Embracing Disruption - Financial Services and the Microsoft Cloud" which examines the challenges and opportunities for the Financial Service Industry in the UK, through the lens of Microsoft Azure, Security, Privacy & Data Sovereignty, Data Ingestion, Transformation & Enrichment, Big Compute, Big Data, Insights & Visualisation, Infrastructure, Ops & Support, and the API Economy.

In this post we discuss the characteristics of a great FinTech startup, and the importance of the API Economy to innovation in Financial Services.

Hymans Robertson was set up in Glasgow in 1921 and is one of the longest established independent firms of consultants and actuaries in the UK. Hymans Robertson soon realised that the computational requirements of their models exceeded the capacity of their on-premise datacentres and that the most cost effective solution would be to use the cloud to perform their Big Compute. But before they could harness the cloud to help them solve their Big Data problems, the business needed to understand the ramifications of moving to the cloud; everything from regulatory, risk and compliance concerns,  to how their internal Ops team would need to evolve and adapt, and how to deal with moving data from on-prem into the cloud.

There is a lot of hype about the blockchain - usually wrapped up with talk about Bitcoin and crypto-currencies. In this article, we look at its impact on trust, and auditability in financial services, and why it may (or may not) be appropriate for your solutions.

In this post we review the FCA's guidelines for the adoption of cloud services by FinTech businesses, and help you to understand their impact across the value chain.

To celebrate FinTech Week, we've released an eBook based our our talk about Disruption in Financial Services at Future Decoded.

This post looks at what machine learning really is (and isn't), dispelling some of the myths and hype that have emerged as the interest in data science, predictive analytics and machine learning has grown. Without any hard guarantees of success, it argues that machine learning as a discipline is simply trial and error at scale – proving or disproving statistical scenarios through structured experimentation.

Mike Larah shares his tips for how to best customize ConEmu to improve your terminal experience for Windows Command Prompy and PowerShell

Exploring the creation of a tool to detect accidental .NET API changes for accurate SemVer in NuGet packages.

We recently upgraded our TeamCity based CI/CD environment, but we had to make some adjustments to fix failing tests.

Meta-Runners allow you to easily create reusable build components for TeamCity, in this post I demonstrate how to create a Meta-Runner to wrap ILMerge functionality.

Learn how to authenticate against Azure Resource Manager using PowerShell, for fully automated deployments.

Microsoft have added SHA256 support to Signed XML, and Endjin.Licensing has been updating to take advantage of this breaking change.

We get 1000s of page view per day, which means we get an interesting insights into current Web Browser usage statistics. Here are the numbers for January 2016.

We've reached our first milestone - a whole year of publishing Azure Weekly. To celebrate we're giving away stuff!

We've built and open-sourced a Visual Studio Extension that provides basic support for discovering and running CucumberJS tests with Node.JS, in the Visual Studio Test Environment.

In this post, Mike Larah discusses how to ensure your C# collections are thread-safe, only run-once, and are lazy-loaded.

Consumption based pricing is a one of the USPs of Cloud PaaS services, but the default settings aren't necessarily optimised for cost. Significant savings can be made from understanding your workload.

Running a start-up or bootstrapping a new product within an established business can feel pretty chaotic. We talk about strategies for managing the time of a team, and ensuring that you become predictable.