Engineering Health

Many modern web browsers come with tools that can help developers debug their websites. If you are using Google Chrome or Firefox for example, try pressing F12. A new panel should open containing various tools. These tools provide a look "under the hood" for the current page. Common tools include a JavaScript console, JavaScript debugger, DOM explorer, network request viewer, performance profile, local storage manager, and more.

We are pleased to announce Carbon Graphs as an open source code project! Carbon is a lightweight, vanilla JavaScript visualization API built with D3 that integrates well with any consumer’s tech stack. It provides a variety of graph types that are framework agnostic and responsive out of the box. Motivation Over the past few years, we have gradually updated our user interface to use modern JavaScript libraries such as mithril.

We are pleased to announce the release of CCL Unit and CCL Testing as open source code projects, as well as the release of the CCL Testing plugin artifacts to Maven Central. Cerner Command Language (CCL) is a database query and scripting language used with Cerner Millennium databases. CCL Unit is a unit testing framework for CCL written in CCL. The CCL Testing plugins generate reports for viewing the results of CCL Unit tests and static analyses of CCL programs and for generating code documentation from comments in the source code for CCL programs.

Cerner hires a lot of software engineers. In fact, we have hired over 1,600 engineers since our early career onboarding program, DevAcademy, went live almost six years ago. In particular, we use DevAcademy to onboard early career software engineers. DevAcademy is a three part onboarding program built by engineers for engineers. The first part of DevAcademy is DevEssentials which covers a lot of the basics new engineers need to know about development ecosystems in our development environment.

At Cerner Engineering, we love to celebrate Pi Day. This day is not only a fun time to enjoy eating pie and reflecting on mathematical properties, but we also share big announcements internally for our developers conference, DevCon. Drew a crowd to celebrate Pi Day this afternoon with snacks, lightning talks, and our DevCon 2018 theme reveal! #314day #cernerdevcon pic.twitter.com/wyy5eLKHVl — Cerner Engineering (@CernerEng) March 14, 2018 For this post, we thought it would be fun to share a simple example of how you can hook your existing monitoring system to a physical alarm system powered by a Raspberry Pi.

It is winter time in Kansas City, which also included our fourteenth edition of ShipIt, our routine hackathon competition we host at Cerner Engineering. Although the snowy weather may have kept participants between the warm walls of our Innovations Campus, the winter storm did not disturb the initiative and enthusiasm of the fourteen participating teams. Check out the video below to hear from ShipIt Day participants and supporters as to why ShipIt Day has become an engineering-wide program that supports Cerner’s development culture.

In 2010 a group of Cerner engineers went to their leadership with an idea: a Cerner tech conference just for the internal development community, built and run from the ground up. The idea for a conference like this had been brewing at Cerner for several years. It was seen as an opportunity to create a large scale, sharing and learning experience for associates in Cerner’s technical workforces. From the beginning, buy-in from leadership was essential for the conference to succeed.

At Cerner, associates are always encouraged to develop tools and methods to improve their productivity. With this year’s theme being "Engineering Productivity," Cerner’s fourth annual 2^5 Coding Competition provided associates another opportunity to dive into this subject and get involved in Cerner’s development culture. As usual, this year’s 2^5 Coding Competition was kicked off alongside Programmer’s Day festivities on September 13th. The competition lasts 32 days, and associates are encouraged to submit code every day.

What does it take to be awarded the ShipIt Day Golden Keyboard? ShipIt Day XIII concluded last week after an intense 24-hours of brainstorming, building, and presenting. Various projects were completed by Cerner associates across twelve diverse organizations. ShipIt Day XIII’s projects were some of the most technically advanced this competition has ever seen. Awarding the Golden Keyboard is no easy job for our judges. Back in 2014, the trophy was created to provide the winning team with a memento that was unique and grew with the competition.