Helping Real People in Real Time: COVID Staffing Project Redesign

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The global COVID-19 pandemic has plunged the world into an unprecedented time of turmoil, in which finding efficient solutions to never-before-seen problems can save lives. Grio has been able to work with collaborators to increase global efficiencies for front line responders. In this blog , I will talk about my recent work with the COVID Staffing Project,  redesigning a website that provides resources for emergency personnel.

What’s new in ECMAScript 2020?

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Once a year, we’re treated to a new batch of features in ECMAScript, better known as JavaScript. In this post, I’ll give a quick overview of the history of ECMAScript (including how and why it technically differs from JavaScript) and its feature update process, and talk about a few of the new features released in ECMAScript 2020.

An Introduction to Cybersecurity

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On November 2, 1988, the Morris worm became one of the first large-scale attacks on the then-nascent Internet. Robert Morris, a Cornell student, had intended to write a program to measure the size of the Internet — but thanks to a bug, his program ended up shutting down thousands of computer systems.

A Migration Overview: Moving from Heroku to AWS

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Recently, my Grio teammates and I supported one of our clients in migrating their Ruby on Rails application from Heroku to AWS. The motivation for the switch — namely, a need for more power and flexibility as the app evolved — is one that many growing companies share; in this blog post, I’ll give a high-level overview of our process and considerations, which I hope will prove helpful (or at least interesting!) to others who are embarking on their own migration journeys.

Creating Great Project Estimates

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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. 

Choosing the Right Tech for Mobile App Development

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Mobile app development technology has evolved quite a bit in the past decade. In this post, I’ll provide an overview of current development options — from native solutions, to legacy cross-platform technologies, to emerging toolkits — and offer some thoughts on choosing the right tech for your project. 

What to expect from product and visual design in 2020

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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. 

An Introduction to Kanban

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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.