Welcome Back to DesignHammer Updates!
We are excited to continue to share news, tools, and tips. The year is off to a great start with new projects going and with the start of the 2017 conference season. I hope you enjoy the contributions from the DesignHammer team; if you do, please complete the survey linked at the end to help us evolve into an even more engaging format.
Featured Blog Post | Recent Projects | In Production | New Clients | Awards and Recognition | Tools and Technology | Conferences | Professional Development | Community Involvement | Featured Client | Around Town | Anything Else
Featured Blog Post
Following up with our Groovy Pipeline
We recently upgraded our Jenkins continuous integration system to use Groovy-based pipelines. Jay has written about what it took to convert 30 freestyle build jobs into two self-contained pipeline scripts in the blog post Building a Groovy Pipeline.
Recent Projects
Labor Notes Launches a New Online Course
Labor Notes has launched a new online course “Beating Apathy”, which focuses on taking action to improve your workplace. We worked with them to implement a syncing process between the user registration in Drupal and the course management workflow in Salesforce.
In Production
Durham CrimeStoppers
Durham CrimeStoppers provides an invaluable public service to Durham and the surrounding region. By providing a service to take anonymous tips, CrimeStoppers helps keep the community of Durham safer for all of the residents and businesses. DesignHammer is excited to have the opportunity to update the website both to create a more responsive and searchable interface for users, but also to provide streamlined workflows to allow the CrimeStoppers program to spend more time with the community and less updating the website.
New Clients
Qualyst
DesignHammer was recently commissioned to redesign the Qualyst Transporter Solutions, LLC website. Qualyst emerged as a biotech company in the early 2000s, to market technology spun out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to quantify xenobiotic metabolism by the liver. The Qualyst differentiator is an improved liver model that has applications in a wide range of markets, both in Pharma and beyond.
Awards and Recognition
Communicator Awards
We are proud of our work with our clients but it is nice to be recognized externally. We submitted four entries for the 23rd Communicator Awards, a leading international awards program that highlights big ideas in marketing and communications. The Communicator Awards receives over 6,000 entries from companies and agencies of all sizes. DesignHammer was recognized with a 2016 Award of Excellence for the Interiors in Flight website.
Tools and Technology
Command Pad
Franks subscribe to a weekly newsletter called What a Tool! that post links to interesting and useful tools for front-end development and design. In it was a tool called Command Pad, it’s an app built on Electron used to run individual command line tasks. In his case, Frank uses it to run Grunt and/or Gulp tasks. His favorite part of the app is that it maintains a list of commands, so you can always go back to them later.
regex101.com
A regular expression (or regex) is a search pattern that can be used to run find and/or replace operations on strings. These expressions use their own special syntax and can become incredibly complicated depending upon the complexity of the string. regex101.com gives a detailed explanation of what is happening in your regex and allows you to test and refine in order to make sure you are finding the exact string you expect. Trying to figure out a bug in a regex written by another developer? Paste it in, and regex101.com will give you a full explanation of each part of the expression. This explanation is great to paste into a comment block for future devs (including yourself) who come upon it. Unless you are dealing with regex every day, it is a great resource to demystify and increase productivity.
Conferences
NCTech4Good Sponsorship
DesignHammer is proud to sponsor the 8th annual NCTech4Good Conference, June 6-7, 2017, at The Solution Center in Durham. The two-day event covers technologies that can advance the mission of nonprofit organizations. DesignHammer has been a sponsor of the conference since 2012.
Professional Development
AIGA Mentorship Program
I applied for and was accepted into the AIGA Mentorship program, which runs February - June. The kick-off meeting was a few weeks ago, where I found out that I was assigned to be in a trio rather than a pair. My fellow mentee works at RDU Airport as a designer. Our shared mentor works as a Senior Designer at IBM. We have started to get to know each other and establish our goals for this program. The three of us will be meeting bi-monthly, and I’m excited to see each group member progress as we all collaborate.
AMA VIP Meeting
An early morning meeting at Capstrat provided David and Stephen to meet with other members, as well as discuss High Five Conference logistics with Chapter leadership. We have great expectations for making connections at High Five at the end of the month.
AIGA Raleigh Member & Community Appreciation Mixer
On February 8th, David Minton met up with around forty members of the Triangle design community at Jimmy V's Osteria + Bar on Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh. Over pizza and beer he made some new connections, met up with some other AMA members, and learned more about AIGA.
Community Involvement
Let’s Encrypt Donation
Encryption between web browser and server is no longer an option even for the most basic of websites. To make encryption available to all of our clients we’re switched to Let’s Encrypt, a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). We are happy to pass along the savings over the Commercial SSL certificates we have been using (typically costing $50-$300 per year), though to support Let’s Encrypt, we will be collecting $25 per year, which we will donate to Let’s Encrypt to support the mission of improving Internet security for everyone.
AIGA Membership
To further support the promotion of excellent design in the area, David joined the Raleigh chapter of AIGA: the professional association for design, with a stated mission “to create a place where designing thrives for everyone.” He joins Frank Yonnetti and Jeanette Larsen on the AIGA member rolls.
NCTech4Good Scholarships
In addition to sponsoring the 2017 NCTech4Good Conference, DesignHammer is sponsoring four scholarships to allow participants for whom the full registration fee is a financial hardship to attend the conference at a greatly reduced rate.
NCTech4Good February MeetUp
David attended the monthly NCTech4Good meetup, held at UNC-TV in Research Triangle Park. This meeting covered technology trends and tools for nonprofits, as well as a preview for the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington DC in March.
The Daily Tar Heel's 124th Birthday Conference
The independent student newspaper of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, founded in 1893, The Daily Tar Heel (DTH) is one of the most decorated college newspapers in the country, with alumni working across the nation. DesignHammer’s own David Minton is a former desk editor of the DTH attended annual conference with fellow alumni from recent decades. Two days of panel discussions were led by alumni representing a range of prominent publications including Boston Globe, the Washington Post, The New York Times.
Featured Client
CEO Roundtable on Cancer
The CEO Roundtable on Cancer is an organization focused on workplace wellness, research innovation, and global cancer control. Since 2001, they have been striving toward the elimination of cancer as both a personal disease and public health problem. One of their main programs is the CEO Cancer Gold Standard™, which aims to provide accreditation in workplace wellness for companies in the USA and globally. These companies have proven that they have taken action in the Five Pillars of the CEO Cancer Gold Standard™: 1). Prevention, 2). Screening, 3). Cancer Clinical Trials, 4). Quality Treatment and Survivorship, and 5). Health Education and Health Promotion. Accreditation and membership are both free and can help your organization take employee health to the next level.
Around Town
Mattie B’s Public House
Mattie B’s Public House provides a foodies twist on the sports bar: from house made chips with Paprika, Manchego, Chorizo, Garlic Oil, Scallions, and Olives (“The Spanish Inquisition”) to a burger with BBQ spices, bacon, and pimento cheese (“The Deep South”). The excellent food offerings are paired with an extensive beer and cider list. For lunch, NY style pizza by the giant slice is also available.
Cinco de Mayo
One of the largest Mexican restaurants near the DesignHammer offices, Cinco de Mayo does a brisk business during lunch. Lunch and dinner portions are available and both are quite generous. The menu features American-Mexican standards, as well as well as less common dishes such as sincronizadas and an extensive torta and individual taco selection (including buche (pork stomach) and lengua (beef tongue).
Anything Else
Drupal Bugfix Landed
DesignHammer continues to be involved in the Drupal community. Lead developer Jay Roberts landed a bug fix in the Webform module this month.
webform_results_export_batch does not support option to filter by sids https://www.drupal.org/node/2764465 Total time in queue 7 months 6 days.
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