Engineering Health

In 2010, a group of designers from Columbus, Ohio set out to create a grassroots, cross-discipline, and creative conference. Since that first event, Midwest UX has been an ongoing tradition that attracts innovative ideas and provides an opportunity for regional professions to engage in discussion with other professionals. Last year, Amber Wilks and Dr. Becca Green were invited to take their talk from DevCon 2016 on the road to Midwest UX.

Introducing Jwala, a Resource Manager for the Apache Community Apache Tomcat and Apache httpd are hardened, scalable, and reliable open-source solutions. Widely adopted, these solutions are commonly used to host and load-balance Java applications. Configuring and managing a small set of elements is relatively easy, but once you start scaling out your application and platform, things get complicated. Questions such as "How do I update the heap or database pool-size across hundreds of Java Virtual Machines (JVMs)?

In a previous post, we discussed the need to provide education around our ecosystem and implementation of the FHIRR and SMARTR standards for developers and how we did so at our annual Cerner Health Conference. That same week, we were also a part of FHIR DevDays, which included a track entitled "Apps in the EHR." We worked alongside track participants who were seeking to integrate their apps in a variety of EHRs, including Cerner.

There is no better way to end summer than with ShipIt Day! We kicked off our ninth ShipIt Day on August 10th, with more than 75 Cerner associates signed up. Nineteen different teams worked for 24 hours straight to complete their projects. For those unfamiliar with the event, ShipIt Day is a 24 hour hackathon for internal associates to create something innovative, usable, and value-adding. This was the second ShipIt held at our new Innovations Campus.

Last fall our team (Mike Tweten, Trevin Teacutter, and Zameer Sura) started working on the problem of automating DC/OS deployments in a way that wouldn’t require multiple teams to duplicate effort and tie themselves directly to DC/OS APIs. While DC/OS certainly makes the act of deploying an application much easier than anything we’ve used previously, there are still many different ways you could choose to layer on deployment strategies and integrate with continuous delivery systems.

Background In order to manage the health of populations, Cerner builds data-driven solutions built on top of its HealtheIntentSM platform. The platform transforms and standardizes data across disparate health systems. The data is then used in algorithms that aid healthcare providers and hospitals in managing and monitoring health both at a person and population level. The Reference Record is one of the core components of the HealtheIntent platform. It represents the data known about a person’s health from a particular source of healthcare information.

When we first were given access to Splunk we were excited about all the functionality it could provide our team to help us monitor and debug our applications. We created alerts to email us if our applications are logging errors, dashboards to show health or metrics of our services, and field extractions as well as tags to make searching easier. As we created more and more of these Splunk knowledge objects we started to have issues.

Last October, I had the privilege to speak at Grace Hopper, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. It was impressive to see 15,000 fellow female technologists gather together to share their experiences and technical expertise. To look into the audience, and see a room full of other female engineers was a great experience! My talk was titled, You May Not Be a Polyglot, but Your Code Needs to Be (previously presented at Midwest.

ShipIt Day VIII was held on April 20 and 21st. Seventeen teams made up of internal associates had just 24 hours to create something innovative, usable, and value-adding. This quarter’s ShipIt Day was held at our new Innovations Campus in the Link Conference Center. We were excited to get to utilize the space for this event. Another awesome addition to this quarter’s ShipIt Day was our new game rooms.