Good estimates are extremely important to us at Grio. The process of estimating the time and resources required to complete a project helps us understand a client’s needs, forces us to think through all of the dependencies and tasks, and reveals opportunities to better align our technologies and methods with the client’s interests. More importantly, good estimates build trust — our clients deserve to know exactly what they’re committing to when they hire us for a project, and as we go through the steps of creating an estimate, we’re demonstrating our ability to ask insightful questions and come up with a clear project plan. 

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Happy New Year from the Grio design team!

As we kick off 2020, we’re hearing a lot about new and recurring design trends that are likely to dominate the next 12 months. I’ve put together an overview of key things to look out for, focusing on the areas that are most relevant to our work at Grio — namely, technology product design and visual design for web and software interfaces. 

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Kanban is a project management framework that works especially well for small, fluid teams working on fast-paced or short-term projects. In this post, I’ll give a quick overview of the kanban process, discuss the 6 core practices of kanban, and talk a bit about the key differences between kanban and the more ubiquitous scrum methodology. I’ll also provide some tips for determining whether kanban is a good fit for your team or current project. 

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In early November, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released its preliminary report on the fatal March 2018 collision between an Uber self-driving car and a pedestrian. The report reveals that the car’s self-driving technology suffered from numerous literal and figurative blind spots — among them, the inability to reliably identify a pedestrian outside a crosswalk. 

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Recently, I was browsing through the archives of the podcast Reply All (well worth doing, if you’re interested in unusual stories about how technology impacts our lives) when I came across an episode titled “The Snapchat Thief”. 

The gist of this episode is as follows: a young woman reports that her Snapchat account has been hacked, and asks asks the hosts of the show to help her investigate. She’s received emails from Snapchat telling her that her password has been changed and her account is now associated with a different phone number — and she’s also received threatening texts from the hacker, warning her not to report the hack to Snapchat. She’s spooked, and has no idea how the hacker gained access to her account, or even why they would want to. 

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