5 days agoFive reasons to love working in Birmingham, UKFor anyone who might be interested in relocating to this fantastic city By Ian Cadman, Director of Engineering at Sidetrade Birmingham has been placed in the world’s spotlight over the last couple of weeks as the Commonwealth Games descended on the city. For those of you that don’t know, the…Relocation4 min read
Published in CodeX·Jul 29How to Run Cypress Docker Images as Build Agents in Azure DevOpsReduce test execution time with the flexibility to run against different browser versions Authors: Oliver Agar, Senior Software Development Engineer in Test Engineering at Sidetrade Sam Berry, Software Development Engineer in Test Engineering at Sidetrade Simon Parr, Senior Software Developer in Test Engineering at Sidetrade Here at Sidetrade, we have…Tutorial5 min read
Jun 213 ways techies can get value from TwitterBy Luke Hennerley As a techie in any discipline, it can be hard to keep up with the ever-shifting landscape and so many information sources. Recently in Sidetrade’s Birmingham office, a few of us have been discussing the evolution of “Tech Twitter” which is exactly what it says on the…Learning4 min read
Mar 15, 2021Rendering HTML content in Word and Excel (in .NET)A key part of our cash collection service involves document conversion from HTML templates to DOC, XLS or PDF. After years of usage, our current solution causes us conversion issues from time to time and we also started seeing limitations such as difficulty of integrating it into new APIs. At…3 min read
Published in The Startup·Oct 27, 2020Could Your Model Recognize a Cow on a Beach? Learning From Multiple Data DistributionThe problem — Do you trust your data? By Victor Bouvier, Data Scientist at Sidetrade Before deploying a machine learning (ML) model into a product, we need to evaluate its performance. A well-adopted practice is to split the data into a train set (data used for training the model) and…Machine Learning10 min read
Oct 19, 2020Diversity in Innovation at Birmingham Tech WeekBy Christelle Dhrif, Chief Communications Officer at Sidetrade. Birmingham Tech Week became the largest regional technology festival in the UK after its hugely successful inaugural event last year. It attracted more than 5,000 attendees to seminars and workshops held across the city. Birmingham now has around 6,000 tech companies that…Technology4 min read
Oct 12, 2020What We Learnt Running our First Virtual HackathonBy James Vickery, Jamie Hennerley and Yassine Fastani A hackathon aims to produce exciting and valuable projects while providing an opportunity for teams from different countries to build new work relationships. After eleven hackathons, which typically consisted of our entire R&D flying out to Paris, our twelfth was a challenge…Hackathons5 min read
Sep 10, 2020Building a Superhero Culture inside EngineeringR&D Superheroes By Luke Hennerley, Lead Application Engineer at Sidetrade Covid-19 forced many businesses to re-evaluate and understand how they can emerge in a position of strength in a post-pandemic world. As lockdowns forced cinemas to close across the globe, we all faced a summer without superheroes. …Leadership5 min read
Feb 18, 2020Modern 2020 React stack, or how we switched away from AngularOur open-sourced frontend stack and the story behind it By Clément Déon, Frontend Architect, and Luke Hennerley, Lead Application Engineer at Sidetrade The essentials Need a solid React stack for your next enterprise-sized application? We’ve setup everything you need to get started into a Github repo available here: sidetrade-labs/react-redux-typescript Modern 2020 stack for a React app built with redux and typescript (and other things) …github.comReact14 min read
Jan 27, 2020What an error by Literary Digest in 1936 teaches us about Amazon and AI bias todayby Dr Clément Chastagnol, Head of Data Science, Sidetrade On 3 November 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt was triumphantly elected President of the United States, with over 60% of the votes, much to the embarrassment of Literary Digest, a leading magazine, which had predicted a landslide victory for his Republican opponent…Data Science6 min read