Engineering Health

Among the many compelling talks that attendees come to expect every year at the Strange Loop conference was a session given by Ben Johnson that provided an overview of a new distributed consensus protocol originating from research at Stanford University, named Raft. What is distributed consensus? Distributed consensus can be described as the act of reaching agreement among a collection of machines cooperating to solve a problem. With the rise of open source distributed computing and storage platforms, consensus algorithms have become essential tools for replication, and thus, serve to enhance resiliency by eliminating single points of failure.

(This post was written by Nathan Beyer, Bryan Baugher and Jacob Williams.) The use of open source software has become nearly ubiquitous in contemporary software development and it is no different for us, here at Cerner. We have been using open source software, directly and indirectly, for decades. Over the past decade, we’ve grown in maturity both in our use of open source software as well as our participation in open source communities.

We are always looking for ways to share knowledge and learn new things within engineering at Cerner. Whether that be through meetups, lunch & learns, conferences, or DevCon, we have a variety of outlets available to us. Today, we’re announcing a new program we recently launched: Cerner Tech Talks. Cerner Tech Talks brings in great speakers for talks that would be of interest to engineers at Cerner. These talks will be held periodically and will vary widely in their content.

Providing opportunities for students to gain experience in software development and grow the skills necessary to excel in their careers after graduation is a top priority for Cerner Engineering. Our annual Software Intern Program gives students insight into the design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance of large-scale software projects, which are often beyond the scope of the typical academic experience. In 2013, we had a total of 224 interns across all business segments with 107 placed into the Software Intern Program to grow their experience as Software Engineers.

Improving the state of healthcare through innovation requires investing in others to join you on the journey; not just for today, but for the decades to come. Project Lead the Way has established the Computer Science and Software Enginering course that teaches computational thinking to high school students, and it will pilot in 60 schools across the country this fall. Providing exposure to a wide variety of computational and computer science concepts, students can program a story or game in Scratch, write a mobile application for Android, and learn about knowledge discovery and data mining, computer simulation, cybersecurity, GUI programming, web development, version control, and agile software development.

This past June, 2,500 associates from across Cerner came together for DevCon, our internal developers conference. Now in its 3rd year, DevCon is a two-day, engineering-led conference that was created to bring together Cerner associates involved in all aspects of development and technology. DevCon is organized and run like many other developer conferences, complete with a call for papers and a talk selection committee. This year, we had 80 talks covering a wide array of topics such as big data, user experience and design, DevOps, and mobile development.

When I graduated from college, I thought I understood what it meant to develop software in the real world. It required process. It required troubleshooting. It required quality. However, to me, process meant waterfall. Troubleshooting meant trying a few things and then asking for help. Quality meant manual testing. Agile methods were not unheard of when I graduated in 2001. My professors noted that iterative development was better than waterfall; they just only taught waterfall.

In software development, we solve problems. As we solve these problems, we build connections in our minds of how to look at a problem, relate it to previous problems and solutions, and re-apply past approaches and techniques. These behavior habits build dogmatic ways of thinking and limit design choices to selective technologies we’ve used in the past. As we all know, you have to continually learn new technologies and different ways of thinking to stay current in the ever-changing landscape of software development.

This is the blog form of the Thinking in MapReduce talk at StampedeCon 2013. I’ve linked to existing resources for some items discussed in the talk, but the structure and major points are here. We programmers have had it pretty good over the years. In almost all cases, hardware scaled up faster than data size and complexity. Unfortunately, this is changing for many of us. Moore’s Law has taken on a new direction; we gain power with parallel processing rather than faster clock cycles.