Every year, the technological advancements available to the home gardener become more abundant, bringing more users the ability to easily maintain their very own fresh produce aisle. From soil sensors to plug-and-play growing machines, today it’s easier than ever to grow your very own herbs and vegetables.
Over the last four months, I have been working on a project that helps architects to design strategies they need to optimize workspaces. We have used Elixir, Phoenix, and Absinthe to create a GraphQL API. Currently, we are interacting with this API by sending in queries and mutations. There is a third operation that can be implemented to receive near real-time updates of some server action in the clients of an application.
In this post, I’m going to discuss what GraphQL subscriptions are and how to implement them using Absinthe.
When building a new product, Grio always likes to start with a user story workshop (USW). A USW is our way of bringing a cross-functional team together to visualize the project and create clear project goals and priorities. In this post, I will introduce the USW and the benefits it provides for both Grio and our clients.
Grio was recently asked by Soundwater Technologies to add Spanish and Portuguese translations to their iOS and Android mobile applications. The app pairs with Soundwater’s hardware to use ultrasonics to measure water flow. This project was a large undertaking, but it could have been avoided: if internationalization and localization patterns had been used during the initial app development, the process would have been nearly instantaneous.
Several months ago, in the height of the pandemic, Grio partnered with AKQA, a design and communications agency, to help build a website for IBM’s new initiative called “The Urgency of Science.” In this blog post, I will discuss the project, as well as the React Animation technologies we used to make their designers’ lofty website dreams a reality.
As I have helped some of my older relatives use technology and have watched them get frustrated time and time again, I’ve realized that tech has continually ignored the senior citizen population. Most of the time when we are designing something, our clients are focusing on the up-and-coming iPhone and the tech-savvy generations. Even when efforts are put in to create a user-centered design, a consideration of the needs of seniors are not typically part of that process.
For this post, I’ll review a recent theoretical case study I did for the Amazon.com shopping experience, and review some of the ways that it could be optimized for the senior citizen population.
For many of us, climate change has been front and center in our lives for quite some time. With such a global issue, it can often feel overwhelming to think about how we, as individuals, can influence our climate for the better. In this post, I’ll discuss ways in which new technologies are helping us make better choices and combat climate change.
Virtual fitness is on the rise. Thanks to the lockdowns and social distancing of the last year, gyms have been closed, and many people have had to shift to virtual fitness for their daily workouts. As a result, technology is increasingly finding a permanent place within people’s fitness routines.
Over the past few years, there has also been a considerable shift in consumer mindsets: gym-goers are more curious than ever before to know more about their overall wellness, which encompasses everything from working out and eating right to mindfulness and sleep quality.
This post explores how these two variables have come together to create a new virtual fitness movement, and how our fitness equipment is evolving in response.
One of the larger debates in the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency revolved around his social media presence and how much he should be allowed to say online. On Twitter, for example, he was given free rein for most of his presidency, tweeting a staggering 12,200 times in 2020. However, in the final months, Twitter began posting warnings with tweets that were factually incorrect, and eventually banned him altogether.
The progression of Trump’s fall from Twitter has prompted many to question social media platform policies on content moderation. Large social media platforms have revealed the complexity of content moderation, and the ongoing evolution of the field.
When you hear the phrase “Actor Model,” your mind may have gone to Hollywood, but the Actor Model is actually a programming model designed to make performing concurrent operations simpler.