How Did Someone Purchase Nyan Cat? The Truth Behind NFTs

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If you were on the internet in 2011, you probably spent at least some time watching the mesmerizing Nyan Cat video. Last February, a special version of this gif was sold for more than $600,000. But how does this happen and what does it really mean? Welcome to the world of NFTs. 

When Small Software Bugs Cause Big Problems

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For most of us, software bugs are the annoying little things that we encounter in the form of small errors, like misaligned text or a clipped image. However, in rare situations, these small bugs can have massive ramifications. In this post, I will be discussing three such events: the Therac-25, the Mars Spirit Rover, and the June 2021 Fastly malfunction. 

Staff Spotlight: LaToya Brown

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I am a Quality Assurance Engineer with Grio. If you partner with Grio, there is a good chance that I will get the opportunity to work with you to create a final product you love. In this blog post, I will tell you a bit more about myself and the role of the Quality Assurance Engineer.

Using HAML with Ruby on Rails

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Big Picture

The ultimate goal of any webpage is to display useful information to a user. What the user sees on the page is commonly referred to as the view layer. Over the years various methods of delivering views have been developed. 

Automating Your Home Garden

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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.

GraphQL Subscription using Absinthe

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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.

Building Success with User Story Workshops

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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. 

Internationalization and Localization for Mobile Applications

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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. 

Designing for Accessibility

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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.