posted

March 10, 2020

A Migration Overview: Moving from Heroku to AWS

by

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.

read on

posted

February 24, 2020

Creating Great Project Estimates

by

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. 

read on

posted

February 18, 2020

Choosing the Right Tech for Mobile App Development

by

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. 

read on

posted

January 13, 2020

What to expect from product and visual design in 2020

by

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. 

read on

posted

January 9, 2020

An Introduction to Kanban

by

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. 

read on

posted

November 27, 2019

An introduction to smart contracts

by

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. 

read on

posted

November 4, 2019

SIM swapping: Do hackers have your number?

by

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. 

read on