Engineering Health

Another ShipIt Day was held on September 8th-9th at the Realization Campus at Cerner. ShipIt is a 24-hour hackathon with the goal of building something awesome, usable, and value-adding within a single day. This fall marked our sixth ShipIt, which has has grown significantly since our first event. The event kicked off in the morning at the auditorium of our Realization campus. At this point, teams were already formed, instructions were given, and shirts were handed out.

Cerner is building an open source, mobile-first user interface component library for healthcare applications. Pulling years of experience and lessons learned across multiple teams together, we are creating something great. We are very excited to bring this solution to the public and to be contributing back to the community! We didn’t simply decide to create this library, we started with segmented UI libraries focused on different aspects of the company which had smaller isolated needs.

We are excited to congratulate our own Michelle Brush for receiving the Rising Trendsetter STEMMY award. The Rising Trendsetter Award is given to a woman in STEMM areas with less than 20 years of experience and has demonstrated significant achievements early in their career. Michelle is a director at Cerner who manages an engineering team in population health as well as a team dedicated to improving Cerner’s development culture. One of Michelle’s most notable career accomplishments was her leadership role in reconstructing Cerner’s software engineer development program in 2013, which she personally oversaw until the end of 2014 (read about the details of this program in her blog).

Every year we hold an internal developers conference called DevCon. This year we had 295 submissions for talks, ranging from a deep technical dive into the inner workings of Kafka to a reflection on the power of office pranks.‌ I wondered what, if anything, do these submissions have in common? Are there any common themes/topics being discussed? To find out I decided to visualize the talk submissions in a word cloud to create an easily understandable (and hopefully aesthetically pleasing) view of what topics were most common.

Preface As software engineers we invest time into thinking about the problems we are trying to solve every day. Sometimes the problems we face are small or simple. Other times they are large and complex. Either way, we can usually draw from our experience to find a path forward. While coding, we run into a lot of different bugs. Often, they are simple typos or a misuse of an API. These problems do not bog us down very much, and they are quick and easy to fix.

At Cerner, we love Ruby and Rails and use it prominently in our cloud based solutions. When we found out RailsConf 2016 was going to be held in the hometown of Cerner’s headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri, we were excited for the opportunity to support the conference by attending as well as being a sponsor and hosting one of the official after parties. RailsConf 2016 took place in the heart of downtown Kansas City.

ShipIt Day is an all day, all night hackathon with the goal of building something awesome, usable, and value-adding within the given 24 hours. This Spring marked our fifth ShipIt Day, with participation and reach growing with each event. We kicked off the event at 10 AM on Thursday, when teams broke out and got to work and stopped only for food and caffeine. Many stayed until a few hours after dinner arrived, several stayed all night and took naps in their workspace, and a few worked through the whole night.

Open source is an important part of our engineering culture and we love when we’re able to contribute back to the community. We recently open sourced our Tomcat Chef Cookbook, which we use to automate deploying many of our web services here at Cerner. The cookbook is meant to be simple, yet flexible enough to change most anything about Apache Tomcat to your liking. It supports installing any version of Tomcat, configuring any file within the Tomcat installation and deploying web applications.

As a female Software Engineer, I know the benefits of having other females in the field to fellowship with as well as the benefits of early exposure to coding and the technology field. The Girls in Technology Movement Hour of Code event held December 9th, 2015 at Cerner’s Innovation Campus was a great opportunity for girls from nearby schools to gather and hear a little about the technology industry, the opportunities available for their future, meet some women in the industry, and get a hands-on introduction to coding.