Category Archives: Grio

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November 1, 2017

Computed Properties vs Functions – Why Does It Matter?

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Cookies

What’s your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe? I bet you could ask that question to 5 different people and get 5 totally different recipes… brown sugar vs white sugar, cake flour vs all purpose, dark chocolate vs milk chocolate. All of these recipes result in a chocolate chip cookie but the process by which we get there is a matter of personal preference.  If you were to ask multiple developers to solve a problem, it’s doubtful that any two developers write identical code.  It’s not that any one solution is necessarily better than the others… the resulting code is likely just a matter of personal preference.

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October 9, 2017

Learning from Project Retrospectives

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Overview

Grio has adapted the Agile methodology to our consulting business; and one of our most valued “ceremonies” is the retrospective. We keep these meetings open to all, and the notes from these meetings are in a shared folder for everyone at Grio to read.

Despite having access, I found them “gathering dust” so to speak, and decided to dig through the entire folder to track Grio’s ability to implement the changes proposed and avoid the pitfalls of previous projects. We’re genuinely asking ourselves, “Are we serious about learning from mistakes?”

I’ve explored the overall process of my research here, and have presented the findings in depth to our entire team. There’s some good news, and some work to do; but we’re happy to see that our efforts have created tangible benefits to our team, our clients, and our bottom line.

We’re asking ourselves:

“Are we serious about learning from mistakes?”

 

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February 21, 2017

The Importance of Onboarding Processes

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Being a new hire can be overwhelming in more ways than one. Meeting new people, learning how the company operates and how to become a successful member of the team.

In order to make this transition smoother, an onboarding process can be put into action. Going through this process typically happens once during the course of employment, beginning at the time of hire. Over time, faces become familiar and the day to day tasks become more routine, minimizing the unknown.

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November 11, 2016

Project Management Best Practices at Grio

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At Grio, it has always been our philosophy that we don’t have a “one-size fits all” approach to project management. Different projects have different goals, so our process needs to be adaptable.  Some clients will come to us with existing processes that we can fit into, whereas other clients maybe be starting from scratch on their project with no processes in place and are looking to us for guidance.  Many clients are somewhere in the middle.

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August 9, 2016

Introduction to React Native

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React Native underlines a JavaScript framework used in writing real and natively rendering mobile applications for Android and iOS. The framework is based on React, which is Facebook’s JavaScript library used in building interfaces for web applications. Building a mobile application using javascript isn’t anything new. The similar technique has been used in frameworks such as Ionic, Sencha Touch, Phone Gap, Cordova, and the list goes on.

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July 17, 2016

Using Ansible for provisioning

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Due to the recent increase of personnel at Grio, it emerged the need of having an automated way of setting up new employers’ machines.

Starting with a brand new machine is always a pain for a developer, and setting it takes at least a couple of days if not the whole first week, resulting in big waste of valuable time. Besides, when a developer starts on a new technology it is not always clear which tools are suggested and which ones the rest of the team are using. Therefore, I have been asked to work as a side project on a way to solve such issues.

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February 4, 2016

Keeping an Eye on Code Knowledge

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In growing companies, as software systems become complex and extensively engineered, maintenance can be a challenging problem. Moreover, when high profile bugs arise and/or a lack of system availability arises, it can have disruptive consequences on a business. Hence there is little room for mistakes in these crucial systems.

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January 26, 2016

Mastering the Art of Client Communication

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At some companies, designers and developers have little to no interaction with clients or customers. It’s not uncommon for the people working on a project to be walled off from clients by account managers or customer service. At Grio, every designer and developer is client facing, and everyone ends up doing some of the work that is traditionally done by an account manager, such as managing day to day contacts, relationship management, and responding to problems & issues.

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November 11, 2015

UX Sketches: When to Share and When to Keep Them to Yourself

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Why Sketch?

One of the great things about Grio is that designers and developers often work together on projects. We have lunch together and tell each other jokes while collaborating to solve challenging problems brought to us by our clients. Some projects come with constraints that force the team to be savvy in the way we produce deliverables. As a result, sketches and sketched wireframes are often a suggested deliverable.

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posted

May 29, 2015

Parallel Computing with a GPU

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Graphic Processor Units are becoming more and more important in recent years and are spreading into many different fields, some of which include: computational finance, defense and intelligence, machine learning, fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, electronic biology, physics, chemistry, numerical analysis and security. There are many reasons why a person should learn how to write code for a GPU. For example, GPU’s have been used to successfully decrypt passwords (add reference) in record time, a 25-GPU cluster is able to crack any standard Windows password (95^8 combinations) in less than 6 hours. Other applications of the GPU include data mining for Bitcoin and also applying machine learning for sentimental analysis on tweets.

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