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.
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.
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.
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.
Let’s say we have two software developers — we’ll call them Itchy and Scratchy. Scratchy has been hard at work on a new feature, and he’s feeling ready for a break, so he submits a PR for Itchy’s review.
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.
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.
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.
You’re probably familiar with the basic idea of a contract. Let’s say, for example, that you’d like to buy a house. In the simplest case, you’d need a seller (someone who is willing to sell their house) and a lump sum of money; you and the seller could then create and execute a contract stating that you agree to exchange the money for ownership of the house.
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.