Streamlining mobile development with CI and CD

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Continuous integration (CI)  and continuous delivery (CD) have significantly improved both my productivity as a developer and my team’s ability to execute smoothly and efficiently on a variety of projects. In this post, I’ll explain how CI and CD work, talk a bit about the benefits of these practices, and walk through an example that illustrates how to set up your own CI/CD systems. 

Measuring software quality

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The word “quality” first appeared in the English language around 1300. Technically, “quality” is a neutral term, referring to the character or nature — good, bad, or otherwise — of a person, place, or thing. However, when we use this word today, we’re often implicitly pointing to high quality. Most modern definitions of “quality” indicate that the term is connected to attributes like lack of risk, ease of trust, superiority to competition, and high value.

Innovations in consumer retail banking

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Consumer retail banking is what most of us know simply as banking, or managing our money in a larger sense — the process by which individual consumers use bank branches or services to open accounts, take out loans, set up credit and debit cards, deposit checks, etc. The consumer retail banking industry is highly regulated and has been historically resistant to innovation, but both governments and financial technology companies have recently begun to push forward some interesting and exciting changes — several of which I’ll cover in this post. 

Passwords, security, and you

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With so much of our personal information stored online, and with security breaches frequently in the news, password security is a big concern for Internet users and developers. In this post, I’ll talk a bit about the different ways passwords can be hacked, the concept of entropy in password security, steps you can take to make your websites or accounts more secure, and how we might expect password technology to evolve over the next few years. 

RailsConf 2019 Recap

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In early May, a small group of Grio engineers (myself included) travelled to Minneapolis for RailsConf. Although I’ve presented at conferences in the past, this was my first time attending a tech conference exclusively to learn, and I had a great time. In this post, I’ll give a quick recap of my favorite talks, and pass on a few things that I learned from the experience overall.

An introduction to design thinking

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The Grio design team has grown in both size and expertise over the past few years, and as our Design Manager, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how we can improve our tools and processes to continue supporting that growth. One step I’ve taken has been to formally integrate a design thinking approach into all of our projects. In this post, I’ll provide a brief introduction to design thinking, explain how it works in practice, and dig into the critical role of empathy in good design.