Engineering Health

On March 8th and 9th, 17 teams of Cerner associates competed for the Golden Keyboard during our 11th ShipIt Day. During this 24-hour hackathon, associates were challenged to create something innovative, usable, and value-adding. This was the fourth ShipIt held at our new Innovations Campus, leveraging the wonderful collaborative spaces available. With Shipit XI, we expanded upon a time-honored tradition of this event, the traveling trophy Golden Keyboard.

At Cerner, we manage our own infrastructure and a big part of that is managing F5 load balancers. If you are a Ruby developer or a network engineer and regularly work with F5s, then I have good news! I’ve created a gem that abstracts iControl’s REST API. It makes working with the API easy to understand and eases the effort required to automate changes across many devices. 1 2 api = IcontrolRest::Client.

One year ago this month, Cerner development associates in Kansas City moved into a new place to call home for their workdays, Innovations Campus. The first two towers that stand on this campus provide 805,000 square feet of workspace for more than 3,000 associates. Eventually, the campus will grow larger, including 16 buildings and 16,000 Cerner associates. As that growth approaches, it is important to reflect on what these first two towers represent for associates and their development careers at Cerner.

On December 14th and 15th, 18 teams of Cerner associates competed for the Golden Trophy during our tenth ShipIt Day. Being this was our tenth, it was fun to reflect back on how this event started and how much it has grown. It has been great to see ShipIt Days start from small hackathons organically run by individual teams to now an engineering-wide quarterly event that brings together engineers from disparate organizations, allowing for a better cross-pollination of ideas and team members.

At Cerner, we often make use of many open source projects in our infrastructure. I work on a team responsible for Cerner’s Ingestion Platform, a critical piece of infrastructure that takes in TBs of data and over a billion messages per day. The platform’s responsibility is then to make this data available for downstream teams to consume. When designing the Ingestion Platform, we felt Apache Kafka was perfect for ingesting and consuming these massive streams of data.

Cerner has a very compelling story that many want to learn from. Cerner’s Agile Champions are regular presenters at local, national, and global conferences. We routinely host calls and site visits for interested companies around the world who want to figure out how we were able to adopt Agile so quickly and sustain it so successfully. Despite our success, there has been a general feeling at the engineering leadership and Agile Champion tiers that we aren’t getting the benefits from Agile that we once were.

Presentation Abstract by Jody Butts, Sr. User Experience Designer Given on August 11, 2017 at the UX Australia Conference in Sydney Full presentation audio and slides are available here: http://www.uxaustralia.com.au/conferences/uxaustralia-2017/presentation/bad-design-is-bad-for-your-health-why-data-visualization-details-matter/ The proper design of data visualization details is imperative for accurate and actionable data visualizations and dashboards. In the health care technology industry, even the smallest design detail on a graph of patient data can have a dramatic impact on patient safety and outcomes.

The Competition Part of Cerner’s engineering culture is to celebrate technology. This past fall, we had our annual celebration for Programmers’ Day. We celebrated the day with great food (taco bar and ice cream) and an evening of trivia. Topping off Programmers' Day with a taco bar and trivia night with @geekswhodrink pic.twitter.com/pSjqBVBHxK — Cerner Engineering (@CernerEng) September 13, 2017 Happy Programmers' Day! Celebrating with an ice cream social. pic.

We’re excited to open source Bunsen, a library to make analyzing FHIR data with Apache Spark simple and scalable. Bunsen encodes FHIR resources directly into Apache Spark’s native data structures. This lets users leverage well-defined FHIR data models directly within Spark SQL. Here’s a simple query against a table of FHIR observations that produces a table of heart rate values: spark.sql(""" select subject.reference person_id, effectiveDateTime date_time, valueQuantity.value value from observations where in_valueset(code, 'heart_rate') """).