Symptomatic, LLC

Fonts and typography are fun. Material Design is a framework (developed by Google) that basically geeks out on how to assemble your typographical elements together into a design language. If you're into fonts and typography, it's fantastic. It provides a theming engine, reusable components, and can pull different user interfaces together under a common design paradigm. I'd highly recommend looking into Borries Schwesinger's book "The Form Book" if you're going to be working with Material UI or are otherwise new to component design.

https://www.amazon.com/Form-Book-Creating-Printed-Online/dp/0500515085

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2 upvotes·712.8K views

We wanted a JSON datastore that could save the state of our bioinformatics visualizations without destructive normalization. As a leading NoSQL data storage technology, MongoDB has been a perfect fit for our needs. Plus it's open source, and has an enterprise SLA scale-out path, with support of hosted solutions like Atlas. Mongo has been an absolute champ. So much so that SQL and Oracle have begun shipping JSON column types as a new feature for their databases. And when Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) announced support for JSON, we basically had our FHIR datalake technology.

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2 upvotes·461.5K views

We use Mocha for our FDA verification testing. It's integrated into Meteor, our upstream web application framework. We like how battle tested it is, its' syntax, its' options of reporters, and countless other features. Most everybody can agree on mocha, and that gets us half-way through our FDA verification and validation (V&V) testing strategy.

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2 upvotes·217.9K views

We mostly use rollup to publish package onto NPM. For most all other use cases, we use the Meteor build tool (probably 99% of the time) for publishing packages. If you're using Node on FHIR you probably won't need to know rollup, unless you are somehow working on helping us publish front end user interface components using FHIR. That being said, we have been migrating away from Atmosphere package manager towards NPM. As we continue to migrate away, we may publish other NPM packages using rollup.

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2 upvotes·208.5K views

Most bioinformatics shops nowadays are hosting on AWS or Azure, since they have HIPAA tiers and offer enterprise SLA contracts. Meanwhile Heroku hasn't historically supported HIPAA. Rackspace and Google Cloud would be other hosting providers we would consider, but we just don't get requests for them. So, we mostly focus on AWS and Azure support.

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2 upvotes·140.2K views

We were long time users of TravisCI, but switched to CircleCI because of the better user interface and pricing. Version 2.0 has had a couple of trips and hiccups; but overall we've been very happy with the continuous integration it provides. Continuous Integration is a must-have for building software, and CircleCI continues to surprise as they roll out ideas and features. It's leading the industry in terms of innovation and new ideas, and it's exciting to see what new things they keep rolling out.

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2 upvotes·122.7K views

React was a very contentious decision among the Meteor community. We started off with Blazejs, which itself was based off of Handlebars. We liked the HTML-like syntax of Blaze and how nurses, doctors, and other clinicians could become familiar with it. However, the code wasn't very reusable and it was neither modular nor composeable nor testable, and became a major headache to maintain. React solves the problems of composeability and reusability and testing isolation, at the price of having worked the problem backwards and having wound up with a quirky syntax that runs within Javascript that looks similar to HTML but isn't. Nonetheless, React is quickly become a classic example of functional programming techniques, what with its' pure components. All in all, an enjoyable technology to work with that brings some sanity to front-end user interfaces.

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2 upvotes·95K views

As an network mesh technology, a recurring design challenge for us is to create isomorphic (same-shaped) javascript code that supports FHIR data anwyhere... server, client, database, tooling, microcontrollers, etc. That means compiling our code to both Android and iPhone; and to both Windows and Mac and Linux. Electron gets us our desktop deployment and is our gateway into the world of Windows.

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2 upvotes·7K views

We use Selenium for our FDA validation testing.

For those not familiar with FDA and NASA quality control initiatives and testing requirements, suffice it to say that the federal government tends to talk in terms of 'validation and verification testing' in many of its' regulations. There's decades of history behind this term, and the three important takeaways are the following:

First, a project has to have two or more testing strategies, so as not to fall into a bias with a single testing strategy. Second, one of those testing strategies has to be user-centric, commonly known as validation testing. Examples include crash test dummies and end-to-end software acceptance tests. Third, most any other testing strategy can qualify as verification testing.

So, we use Selenium for our FDA validation testing, because it simulates a user walking through the software.

It's big and bloated and slow, and the legacy version runs on Java, and it's brittle and doubles the amount of code we have to write, and is otherwise a total pain in the ass. But it's like folding your parachute before skydiving or having a depth gauge when SCUBA diving or placing bolts when climbing a wall. There are simply some tasks that you don't want to do without safety gear.

And for all its' pain to use, Selenium is like safety gear for building your tech stack. We've migrated across a half a dozen user interfaces, two entirely different back-end languages, three or four data protocols, and countless utilities over the years. And Selenium warns us when we're in danger and it catches us when we fall.

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2 upvotes·6.6K views

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) supports JSON and XML datatypes as it's default data types. We chose Javascript for it's native JSON support and inclusion in every web browser on the market. We also liked it's open source ecosystem, as we had been burned by vendor lock-in from Microsoft and Oracle in the past.

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2 upvotes·1.1K views