Engineering Health

Currently in the world of JavaScript these options are what we most commonly use to generate logs: console.log console.info console.warn console.error These are actually pretty good in most modern browsers. Even if you go back to Internet Explorer 8 console.log and friends work as long as you have the developer tools open. Given that we have these logging utilities what is the problem with using them? When in local development these are just fine for helping debug and speed up development.

Our team works on a patient facing web application with a thousand live clients with 2,315,000+ users. On an average, the high traffic results into more than 40,000 visits and 300,000 page views daily generating about 30,000 logging events. A considerable portion of these events are of information and warning level in order to aid proactive monitoring or identify potential issues due to clients’ misconfiguration. Before Splunk To handle this large volume of logging, our team created a rotational support role to manually monitor the logs at regular intervals daily.

At the beginning of this year, we announced that Cerner became a bronze-level sponsor of the non-profit Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Many of the open source projects we use and contribute to are under the ASF umbrella, so supporting the mission and work of the ASF is important to us. We’re happy to announce that Cerner has now increased our sponsorship of the ASF to become a silver-level sponsor. Open source continues to play an integral role in both our architecture and engineering culture.

Preface I have been asked many times what closures are and how they work. There are many resources available to learn this concept, but they are not always clear to everyone. This has led me to put together my own approach to exchanging the information. I will supply code samples. //> denotes an output or return. Before discussing closures, it is important to review how functions work in JavaScript. Introduction to functions If a function does not have a return statement, it will implicitly return undefined, which brings us to the simplest functions.

Ten teams of two to four Cerner interns competed in a week-long HackFest this summer, working to solve any problem they put their minds to. This competition cumulated in a presentation and judging of projects, with prizes of Raspberry Pi Kits for each member of the second place team and Leap Motions for each member of the winning team. From mobile apps, to machine learning algorithms, to drones…this year’s Summer Intern HackFest has been one for the books.

There is no such thing as plain text “But I see .txt files all the time” you say. “My source code is plain text” you claim. “What about web pages?!” you frantically ask. True, each of those things is comprised of text. The plain part is the problem. Plain denotes default or normal. There is no such thing. Computers store and transmit data in a number of methods; each are anything but plain.

At the end of March, some of our teams held their first 24-hour hackathon, titled ShipIt: Millennium+ Services FedEx Day. We had 41 participants, in 15 teams working on 15 unique projects. The idea was inspired by several teams spending a few hours every so often to work on different projects. After reading about Atlassian’s hack days, we decided to hold one. The event was initially announced early in February, to give teams time to work this into their project plans.

Starting the Big Data Journey When a company first starts to play with Big Data it typically involves a small team of engineers trying to solve a specific problem. The team decides to experiment with scalable technologies either due to outside guidance or research which makes it applicable to their problem. The team begins with the basics of Big Data spending time learning and prototyping. They learn about HDFS, flirt with HBase or other NoSQL, write the required WordCount example, and start to figure out how the technologies can fit their needs.

This is the blog form of the talk Migrating from Eclipse 3.X to Eclipse 4.X - The iAware Story at EclipseCon 2014. The iAware development team was formed in late 2007 and in a little under six months we developed our first solution, CareAware CriticalCare, a dashboard application written using the Eclipse RCP targeted for use in ICU settings. The goal of this application was to provide clinicians with a complete picture of the patient’s status and to do it in a manner that was contextually relevant; meaning that related information was presented together.