Apple Watch Connectivity

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On September 9th, 2014, Tim Cook announced the Apple Watch. This wearable smartwatch quickly gained the loyalty of millions. The wearable was developed in part to incorporate fitness tracking and allow for health tracking, but more-so to free users from their phones. It includes a digital crown used to scroll and zoom, and a touchscreen with Force Touch technology. An extra button under the digital crown serves favorite contacts and access to Apple Pay.

An Introduction to Data Mining

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Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science used to discover patterns in complex datasets. The field has been widely studied since the 70’s since it can produce useful insights that can help to better understand underlying relationships and trends in data sets.

Your Brain on Cognitive Creativity – With Illustrations

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Ever wonder what’s going inside that noggin of yours when you experience a moment of insight that leads to a creative solution? I’m familiar with creativity and exercises to get those creative juices flowing, but, until recently, I hadn’t spent much thought, or any at all really, on the cognitive neuroscience of creativity – the neural connections and mental processes that occur during a creative episode. 

Design & Development in Tandem

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I had the privilege of attending this year’s San Francisco Smashing Conference in early April where I listened to presentations from founders, designers, and front-end developers.

Smashing Magazine is a fantastic online resource for professional designers and developers. They also publish their own books and e-books, as well as host conferences in the U.S. and Europe.

Introduction to React Native

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React Native underlines a JavaScript framework used in writing real and natively rendering mobile applications for Android and iOS. The framework is based on React, which is Facebook’s JavaScript library used in building interfaces for web applications. Building a mobile application using javascript isn’t anything new. The similar technique has been used in frameworks such as Ionic, Sencha Touch, Phone Gap, Cordova, and the list goes on.

Using Ansible for provisioning

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Due to the recent increase of personnel at Grio, it emerged the need of having an automated way of setting up new employers’ machines.

Starting with a brand new machine is always a pain for a developer, and setting it takes at least a couple of days if not the whole first week, resulting in big waste of valuable time. Besides, when a developer starts on a new technology it is not always clear which tools are suggested and which ones the rest of the team are using. Therefore, I have been asked to work as a side project on a way to solve such issues.

Intro to Elm

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In this blog post I’ll be covering Elm, an up and coming functional programming language for building web application front ends. Elm compiles into JavaScript and utilizes virtual DOM technology to efficiently render web UIs. Elm focuses on simplicity for the developer with a helpful compiler and an easy to understand application architecture.

Optimizing database queries

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Most projects you will work on will have a database of some sort. For this reason, optimizing your queries allows you to use all that the database provides without having your application try to reinvent the wheel. In this blog, I’ll be using Postgres and Ruby on Rails to demonstrate some ways that you can optimize things. Much of the second section is Postgres specific, but the concepts should apply to whatever ORM you are using. Hopefully by the end you will have learned some new tricks to improve your project.

EMR Interoperability and the cost of Healthcare

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Healthcare in the United States costs far more than in any other country in the world, and yet the quality of the care Americans receive is rated 11th among first world countries. The high price of healthcare burdens employers, increases the national debt, and historically has left many without access to healthcare. We all want cheaper, better healthcare, but it is difficult to agree on specifics of how to get there. Why is healthcare so expensive?