Engineering Health

In June, we had the pleasure of having Mat Warger join us in our Tech Talk series at Oracle Cerner. Mat is a senior software developer based in Kansas City. He enjoys learning new concepts and has leveraged this curiosity in positions ranging from startups to the enterprise over the past decade. He is a co-organizer of the JavaScript KC meetup group and organizer of GraphQL KC meetup group. He can be found chasing the latest and (sometimes) greatest in a wide range of languages and platforms, including React, TypeScript, GraphQL, and the cloud.

Last month, we had the pleasure of having Dr. Ron Westrum join us in our Tech Talk series at Cerner. Dr. Westrum is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University and author of the Westrum organizational typology model. In his talk, he discusses how an information flow culture reflects how managers shape values and behavior. The first part of this talk will discuss information flow in organizations, as well as provide a case study on Boeing.

Today, we are excited to announce our newest addition in our open-source family, Inspec Delta! In this blog post, we will explain how this is utilized at Cerner to reduce the time in comparing updated infrastructure security benchmarks. Whether you are new to automating your security compliance or have had to deal with maintaining updates to existing benchmarks, this blog post is for you! Background As security standards continuously evolve, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) releases a new revision to their STIG (Security Technical Implementation Guide) for each Operating System major version, as well as certain applications.

ShipIt Days are Cerner Engineering’s 24-hour hackathons where associates are empowered to brainstorm, plan, build, and present a project of their choice. This quarterly event is something associates enjoy by taking a break from their normal routine and focusing on a problem that they seek to achieve within a short time period (one day). The enjoyment of these projects often come from just working on something different, working with other colleagues, and applying their passions to an area they have been desiring to solve.

Since 2017, we at Cerner have been building Terra, a single page web application framework, and accessibility has always been a primary goal. Over the years we’ve learned a lot about how to build and test accessible websites, as well as the diverse group of people we’re serving. With this blog post, we’d like to take a moment to share what we’ve learned so far. Why accessibility matters At Cerner, we build software for many different users in many different roles.

Have you ever wondered what happens when you let two engineers loose on a project with a broad vision and little direction? In our case, LiteBrite happens. Every year Cerner hosts DevCon, an internal 2-day conference for all of Cerner engineering to come together, give talks about technologies, processes, and ideas - all with a little fun sprinkled in. DevCon always has a theme, for 2019 that was set to be “The 80s.

If you have been to our blog before, you might notice that it has a new look. Our past version of the site was one that we had used for several years. It utilized Jekyll for the static site generation, which is a popular project that leverages the Ruby ecosystem. Over the last few months, we recognized that our site needed an update. This change wasn’t only with its look and feel, but also with what we used in building the site.

ShipIt Day, Cerner Engineering’s 24-hour hackathon, provides associates an environment to be creative, work on new projects, and network with other associates. This event is one of the many things that sit at the core of our Engineering Culture at Cerner, and is rapidly growing- now being hosted globally in Romania, Sweden, India, and the UK. In October, our team had the chance to participate in the seventeenth ShipIt Day at Kansas City’s Innovations Campus and managed to take home the Golden Keyboard trophy as the first place team!

Finishing our 16th occurrence of the series, our quarterly ShipIt Day hackathon invites the makers and innovators to come out and share new ways to think about our daily work here at Cerner. Whether it’s experimenting with new features or improving our developer workflows, ShipIt Day gives our engineers a chance to try and learn new things. This ShipIt day in particular had some exciting projects that melded hardware and software.