Drinking The Koolixir – Part 1

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In case you haven’t yet heard of it yet, Elixir is a functional programming language (technically, a collection of macros) written in Erlang. I have been persuaded to add it to my (and, consequently, Grio’s) technical repertoire due to a good amount of recent buzz in the blogosphere (as well as some points I’ll get to later). To make sure I have a strong foundation for my Elixir learning experience, I am starting my adventure with a foray into the underlying syntax of Erlang.

Building Better Products with UserTesting

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Grio Design is showing some blog love this week! We’ve been busy making clients happy by solving wicked design problems and producing beautiful interfaces, but I wanted to take some time to talk about user experience design (UX), usability, and how UserTesting can help everyone reap the benefits of usability testing.

Continuous Integration: An Overview

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Continuous Integration at Grio

In the same way that testing code is more and more becoming table stakes for modern software projects, continuous integration is increasingly becoming standard on projects of any non-trivial degree of complexity. Here at Grio, we leverage continuous integration whenever possible, in order to eliminate time spent performing routine deployments and tracking down integration issues.

Code and Biology

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As science and software advances, we have the ability to fuse the two together to discover and treat diseases in the hopes of prolonging life. Tasks like sequencing the human genome, isolating genetic markers, and handling large amounts of data are now all possible through a scientific field called Bioinformatics – the study and process of biological data through software, engineering, and mathematics.

4 Tips to Help You Choose a Software Development Partner

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As we all know, technology moves at lightning speed, as soon as you think you’re caught up, the next new i-something has launched. Unless you’re constantly keeping yourself privy of the latest and greatest web, mobile and design technologies, hiring a development firm could be a great alternative to help guide you and your project. Whether you’re working in a startup atmosphere or part of a seasoned corporation, these day’s it’s alway nice to know some software experts just in case. Which brings me to my 4 tips to help you find a great engineering partner.

A Software Consulting Conundrum: Providing Estimates While Staying Agile

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Software Estimates

As a software consulting firm, Grio strives to provide high quality, high value software to its clients. We embrace an agile software development methodology based on Scrum. This iterative approach provides our clients with flexibility to adapt and change their product over the course of development as discoveries are made while using the software.

This flexibility can prove challenging when providing up front estimates regarding project costs. The problem arises that providing an estimate that is too high may lose you the contract; Estimating too low can result in several outcomes: