Equal Experts blog
Latest thoughts, hot off the press
MongoDB Feature Formatted
11 April 2013
This article explores how to make use of MongoDB characteristics in order to avoid the downtime traditionally required by migration scripts in the SQL world. This is in order to get closer to the goal of being able to deploy applications with no downtime. Read full article
Functional Programming in the EE Community
05 March 2013
At Equal Experts we are going through the process of building a strong community where everyone has a chance to learn from each other. While there has been a lot of discussion around the EE community there have been only a limited amount of events. I attended Jon Pither’s talk on Clojure last year and realised I was not the only one interested in learning more about functional programming. With the new Community Manager, Karen MacDonald starting I thought it was a good opportunity to sell my idea of a Functional Programming Dojo. Read full article
European Directories Success Story
19 February 2013
Towards the end of August 2012, Equal Experts was contacted by European Directories who were looking for an organisation to deliver high-profile solutions on MongoDB. European Directories, a pan-European local search and lead generation company, had selected Mongo to manage their directory listings content data. As part of the new platform which was being developed and rolled out across their operating companies, the content management system was to form the backbone for the new directory listing solution and was integral to the their new IYP platform migration project. Read full article
Agile NCR
15 February 2013
The Agile NCR conference is a rather recent cousin of Agile India. While our talks at Agile NCR 2013 were quite pertinent to the theme and pragmatic, they also contributed to setting the tone for the further discussions and workshops and were well received by the audience. The talks varied from BDD using Jasmine, Responsive Web Design, MongoDB as an Agile NoSQL Database in the technology sub-conference, to Thinking beyond Stratetic HR in the HR track. Read full article
Tayra - Incremental backup tool for MongoDB
05 February 2013
Equal Experts develops an Incremental back-up tool to resolve data size growth. Business today is unrelenting - and unrelenting. People expect systems and services to work anywhere any time, and more or less immediately. But in the real world this just doesn’t happen, and sometimes the unthinkable does. Crashes are part of this real world. Data is precious and is increasingly becoming a source of revenue or competitive advantage to businesses. Enter Tayra... Read full article
Equal Experts and Telefonica UK Win “Best Agile Team” Category at the UK Agile Awards 2012
26 October 2012
Telefonica UK and Equal Experts have won the "Best Agile Team" category at the UK Agile Awards 2012. Equal Experts was also a finalist in the Best Use of Agile in the Private Sector category. Read full article
O2 eCommerce site wins award after migration to new platform successfully led by Equal Experts
10 October 2012
Telefonica UK has won the “Re-design/Re-launch of the Year” award at eCommerce Expo 2012 for the new O2 eCommerce platform and the redesign of the Customer Facing Upgrade (CFU) shop. Other people in the shortlist that were beaten are British Gas, nails Inc., Nectar, printed.com and PrivateFly.com. Read full article
Introduction to Riak at DeNormalised 2012
03 October 2012
Riak was one of the technologies on show at the DeNormalised conference last week. Riak is a distributed key value database that is built to work at huge scale. Read full article
Equal Experts Claims 11th Spot in Prestigious Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 League Table
16 September 2012
We are delighted to have achieved this year’s 11th spot in the prestigious Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100, a league table that ranks Britain’s 100 private tech (TMT) companies with the fastest growing sales over the last three years. Read full article
Agility within a client environment - tackling fixed bids
12 September 2012
Kim Lennard went to the Agile Evangelists meetup group recently to run a retrospective style talk. After breaking out the Post-it notes and some first class shepherding it became obvious what everyone wanted to talk about. Read full article
Equal Experts Makes The Shortlist in Two Categories of the UK Agile Awards 2012
11 September 2012
Equal Experts has made the short list in two categories of this year’s UK Agile Awards. Finalists in the “Best Use of Agile in the Private Sector,” and the “Best Agile Team” categories for their work at Telefonica UK, Equal Experts beat out stiff competition to make it this far. Read full article
Equal Experts MongoDB Lightning Talks
31 May 2012
At the last MongoDB user group a few our super passionate MongoDB geeks got together to give a series of lightning talks on interesting things they have been doing with MongoDB. Read full article
Using Kanban to manage a large portfolio of projects
03 May 2012
How do you manage a portfolio of projects with large diversity of scope and size? Rhyd Lewis explains the process he set up using Kanban to expose project risks early and enable reliable capacity planning across the technology group of a large multinational finance company. Read full article
NoSQL, the cloud and Equal Experts- O2 Priority Moments keeps on growing
28 February 2012
Last year O2, the UK's leading provider of mobile phones and broadband, released Priority Moments, a new mobile service providing location based offers from leading brands exclusively to O2 customers. The service has seen a huge uptake among O2 customers and is now available as native iPhone, Android and Blackberry applications as well as mobile web. With the recent addition of online offers, the service just keeps on growing. Read full article
Evolutionary design in practice
12 February 2012
A common practice on software development projects is to start with a lengthy tool choice process to make sure the right technologies are employed for the requirements of the project. In practice we find this process can be time consuming and often leads teams down the wrong path as they consider requirements that might materialise in the future. Instead we prefer to pick a set of tools that the team is familiar with that is likely to do the job, and then adapt as requirements become concrete. Read full article
100 Year Architecture- how the battle for the web was lost and won
08 January 2012
How do you build a software architecture that will last 100 years? Julian explores this concept by telling the story of how the internet evolved. By comparing two different approaches taken by two different teams in a race to build the internet that we know today Julian illustrates some winning strategies for software architecture. Read full article
Featured clients
O2 is a dynamic, well loved brand and a pleasure to work with. Over our time with O2 we have delivered a number of projects. The highest profile of which was their innovative mobile offers product, Priority Moments.
EqualExperts were commissioned to develop Rightmove's iPad application to coincide with the launch of the iPad in the UK. With five weeks to deliver from start to finish this was a fast paced, high energy project!
By combining our enterprise-friendly agile approach, project leadership and technical expertise with Tieto's unique domain knowledge, we were able to go from a clean sheet of paper to the beta release of the system in 18 months and 12,000 man-days, whilst constantly adapting to the changing market conditions.