Technology

This fall, we are taking our relationship with Omnilife, Inc. to the next level...

Omnilife and Bio::Neos have been working together on their communication and workflow platform since early 2019, with Bio::Neos playing a strategic consultative role as well as augmenting the internal Omnilife engineering team as needed. This fall, that relationship will be expanding!

Since the inception of the Bio::Neos 16 years ago, it has provided life science researchers with custom designed software. Recently, we have spent much of our time developing web applications. For efficiency, we typically have our developers work on a local copy of the codebase instead of using the web server environment. What this really means is that we need to write a lot of portable code.

So, what is a container and what is containerization?

The world of software is a vast and erratic one, with constant improvements to the tools and technologies developers use everyday. In such a fluctuating field, it is no wonder that colleges and universities focus software related coursework on fundamentals such as programming languages and basic algorithms. Recent grads can then find themselves reeling upon graduating and entering the tech field, where an expansive portfolio and diverse skill-set are valued much more highly than a degree alone.

Data security is an extremely important part of many of our projects at Bio::Neos. For one of our projects specifically, that data is in the form of patient information. For handling these kinds of projects, not only must we ensure that we are developing HIPAA compliant software and infrastructure, but we also are required to add safeguards against that data being leaked due to user error.

We recently worked with a client that has a variety of hardware instruments generating loads of data that is consumed down the road by an assortment of software systems and applications. These software systems function independently (they don't need to communicate to do their job), but in a big picture view one system could be reliant on the results of another — it is a workflow with a lot of manual intervention. The dirty work to generate the data users care about was a distraction that we saw an opportunity to remove.

I always enjoy learning more about other businesses in the tech industry and had a chance to explore several during the CR Tech Crawl. Tech Crawl was created to be an evening of exploring different locations in major cities across Iowa while getting to know fellow Iowans in the industry. Last year the two largest metros of the state played host to a Tech Crawl in both Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.

On the weekend of July 12th I attended Startup Weekend IC, a startup competition held at Merge. The event had three stages. In the first stage, participants pitched their ideas to the crowd and attempted to win a popular vote for their ideas. The six most popular pitches were chosen to continue into the second round. I pitched an idea for self-assembling furniture, but sensing the idea was overly ambitious, was happy it did not go on to the second round.

Community involvement has always been important to us. We embrace as many chances to share our experience as we can. One of these chances came in the form of a great local event that has been a huge catalyst for action in the Eastern Iowa community of entrepreneurs: EntreFEST 2019. As soon as we heard there was a new technology track added to the 2019 event, Mike Smith and I applied to be speakers.

Internet Explorer (and Microsoft Edge) is widely joked about as the bane of any web application developers existence. This is only somewhat true these days as Microsoft contains to make improvements to their browsers and bring them towards web standards compliance (Edge in particular has come a long way to support HTML5 features); but for those of us that have to support old versions of IE it is as true as it is today as it was nearly 10 years ago.

We're a small shop here at Bio::Neos and spend a lot of our time wearing different hats. We try to make switching hats as easy as possible by finding the right tooling and environment to make us as efficient as we can be. Code reviews are a crucial part of our development process that we use to (1) ensure code quality, (2) improve our skills and (3) share knowledge between our developers, at both a project level and a professional level. But because we spend a majority of our time designing and writing software, the code review can be at times an easy part to leave out of the process.