Technology

This summer allows a wonderful opportunity to continue to get kids involved in STEAM. Even though classes are out for the summer doesn't mean students have to stop exploring STEAM outlets. Lucky enough there are resources both in-person and online for our students to continue to learn. Bio::Neos thought it would be helpful to compile a list for parents and students with STEAM resources both in-person and online. 

Spring 2022 at Bio::Neos was productive thanks to our intern, Ningjia Huang. Ningjia is a recent Computer Science graduate of Case Western University. After graduation, she spent her spring as a software development intern for Bio::Neos. Ningjia focused on a new website update and spent most of her time improving her understanding of front-end development. After her internship, I was able to chat with her to get her feedback on how her internship went and what advice she would give future interns.

Our long-term partnership with Classroom Clinic has led us to the newest release, v1.5, on May 20th, 2022. At Bio::Neos we have been hard at work implementing updates to the user and ensuring scalability for the Classroom Clinic platform. Classroom Clinic provides rural school districts with timely and convenient access to children’s mental health services through the use of telehealth and related technologies. 

In the newest release,

Here at Bio::Neos we recognize the importance of hands-on learning and providing post-secondary opportunities for students in our community. Throughout our internship program, high school and college students have the chance to work both collaboratively and independently on different projects ranging from internal backup systems to client projects. Once completed, interns understand that programming careers can be fun and exciting; and gain a renewed motivation to pursue more computer science internships and job shadowing opportunities in the future.

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.