Sometimes a small experiment on the side can grow into something valuable. We at Cerner have long used forward-chaining rules engines to express and execute clinical knowledge, but we’ve also had to extend or work around the capabilities of such engines. Engines targeting business users just weren’t...

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. T...

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 contributi...

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 a...

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 t...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 gre...

At Cerner, we use Chef to automate our deployments across a very large distributed system comprised of many thousands of nodes. While we employ ServerSpec and Test Kitchen extensively to test our Chef recipes, this still doesn’t identify all possible failure scenarios. In a large distributed system ...

Currently in the world of JavaScript these options are what we most commonly use to generate logs: console.log console.info console.warn console.error These are actually pretty good in most modern browsers. Even if you go back to Internet Explorer 8 console.log and friends work as long as you have t...

Our team works on a patient facing web application with a thousand live clients with 2,315,000+ users. On an average, the high traffic results into more than 40,000 visits and 300,000 page views daily generating about 30,000 logging events. A considerable portion of these events are of information a...

At the beginning of this year, we announced that Cerner became a bronze-level sponsor of the non-profit Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Many of the open source projects we use and contribute to are under the ASF umbrella, so supporting the mission and work of the ASF is important to us. We’re happ...

Preface I have been asked many times what closures are and how they work. There are many resources available to learn this concept, but they are not always clear to everyone. This has led me to put together my own approach to exchanging the information. I will supply code samples. //> denotes an out...

Ten teams of two to four Cerner interns competed in a week-long HackFest this summer, working to solve any problem they put their minds to. This competition cumulated in a presentation and judging of projects, with prizes of Raspberry Pi Kits for each member of the second place team and Leap Motions...

There is no such thing as plain text “But I see .txt files all the time” you say. “My source code is plain text” you claim. “What about web pages?!” you frantically ask. True, each of those things is comprised of text. The plain part is the problem. Plain denotes default or normal. There is no such ...

At the end of March, some of our teams held their first 24-hour hackathon, titled ShipIt: Millennium+ Services FedEx Day. We had 41 participants, in 15 teams working on 15 unique projects. The idea was inspired by several teams spending a few hours every so often to work on different projects. After...

Starting the Big Data Journey When a company first starts to play with Big Data it typically involves a small team of engineers trying to solve a specific problem. The team decides to experiment with scalable technologies either due to outside guidance or research which makes it applicable to their ...

This is the blog form of the talk Migrating from Eclipse 3.X to Eclipse 4.X - The iAware Story at EclipseCon 2014. The iAware development team was formed in late 2007 and in a little under six months we developed our first solution, CareAware CriticalCare, a dashboard application written using the E...

Open source plays an integral role within engineering at Cerner. In addition to using open source software throughout our architecture, we recently released a few projects back to the community via our Github organization. Today, we’re happy to announce that Cerner is now a sponsor of the non-profit...

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? Di...

(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. O...

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. C...

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, deplo...

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 s...

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...

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...

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 cho...

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...