At Grio, we’re often asked to improve our clients’ existing web and mobile apps — fixing problems, adding features, etc. — but many of our most interesting and exciting projects involve building a brand-new app entirely from scratch. I’ve had that opportunity on a recent project, which means that my colleagues and I have been thinking through some of the foundational decisions that can really only be made when you’re starting fresh. One of those decisions is monolithic vs. modular. 

read on

User-friendly software doesn’t happen by accident — the best products are designed intentionally, thoughtfully, and thoroughly before implementation begins. However, that doesn’t mean that developers shouldn’t play a role in the early stages of a project. In this post, I’ll talk about why you should bring your developers into design discussions and reviews, and recap a successful design-development collaboration on one of Grio’s recent client projects. 

read on

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. 

read on

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.

read on

Introduction to Part 4

In Part 1, Part 2 , and Part 3 of this series, we covered the basics of custom views, created a simple custom PieChart class, and added state handling and custom methods to expand and collapse the pie chart in response to motion events.

In this fourth and final post, we’ll improve our state transitions with a bit of property animation.

read on

Over the past two months, I’ve been working on learning the Phoenix LiveView framework by building a complex multiplayer online game. In this post, I’ll talk a bit about the benefits of this framework, and give a quick overview of the game architecture and processes I’ve developed. 

read on

Introduction to Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we covered the basics of custom views and created a simple custom PieChart class that can accept data and display it as a pie chart with indicators.

read on