What I love about working in the world of technology is that it is ever changing; it is a never ending learning curve and there is always something new and exciting to learn about - you will never get bored! An interesting observation I've recently had is how graduates perceive IT careers; from discussions I've had it is ...
How & why I chose a career in IT
Last week I volunteered at 'DigiGirlz' - an event targeting year 9 girls going through the process of selecting their GCSE options. It is a Microsoft sponsored event with an objective of raising awareness of what a career in business and technology might look like. During the day I mentored and supported a group of ...
The Hottest Trend in IT – Big Data!
Data, data & more data! There are many stats published on how data is growing at such a rapid pace but we all know that they will be different next month, the predictions just cant keep up. I’m sure many of you reading this are probably thinking "It’s just another IT trend, with yet another Buzz ...
What | Why | How – Software Defined Data Centre
Within the infrastructure space there is a growing number of companies starting to call themselves "Software Defined" but what does this really mean, why should we care and how can organisations start to make use it? The "What" Now if we think back to where the "cloud" era started it began with standardisation and virtualisation of servers; ...
Sleep Tracking Gadgets
If any of you read my previous post you'll know my opinion on how gadgets are starting to become an integral part of our every day lives. One recent trend I've seen is an ever increasing number of gadgets hitting the market to help monitor sleep. We live in a society that's craving information & with ...
Leading a Digital Life
Although I am starting to become known as 'Gadget Girl' when I look around I see it's not just me leading a "digital life", every day I see more and more aspects of my everyday life becoming bound to technology (...and the fact that you are reading this means your the same!). We are all woken ...
Are wearable gadgets on the rise?
I've now been using the Nike+ FuelBand for a couple weeks; for those of you reading that haven't come across this gadget before it tracks your all-day activity (and encourages you to be more active!). Some of the things it tracks includes how long you have been active, number steps taken, number of calories burnt ...
Hadoop in “Plain English” (Part 2 – How it works)
After explaining what Hadoop is in a previous post here I am going to focus on how Hadoop actually works & keeping it in plain simple terminology. As I previously discussed Hadoop is made up of HDFS and MapReduce. HDFS distributes the data and then MapReduce does the actual "work". Those of you that know me will ...
Hadoop in “Plain English”
In a nutshell Hadoop is.... An opensource java framework bringing compute as physically close to the data as possible. Hadoop basically constists of two parts: Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Hadoop MapReduce Plain & Simple... What is HDFS? It will take a file and split it up into many small 'chunks', it then distributes and stores these ...
Virtual walk through Tesco?
Food shopping is just another one of the household chores, so we generally now shop online! The only problem is that it's so easy to forget things (when your flatmate isn't writing a list!!). In "real life" shopping as you walk round the shop you see each area & remember what you need.... so why ...