I have a large tree outside my window. Here in Phoenix, Arizona, USA it's still warm and sunny so our plants are still covered in lush foliage despite so many other places in the full throws of Autumn. My desk is oriented such that I can look out at the tree throughout the day. Part of the reason I like having my desk facing the tree is because I need the break from staring at the computer screens but the other reason is because I need reminders from nature from time to time.
Today I'm reminded of two things:

1. Growth requires absorbing from your environment
2. Growth doesn't always happen in the direction you expect

For the recent InterSystems Tech Video Challenge I put together a submission that summarized how to set up converting a custom HL7 message to SDA and then sending that to a FHIR Server endpoint to be converted to FHIR json. For this I really had to stretch into new territory to absorb all the necessary information and I ended up growing new skills that I didn't expect.

Much like the tree has ample nutrients surrounding it, we have so much documentation outlining the steps needed in order to set up our productions, servers, etc. but they are often in such disparate places that gathering it all and putting it together can be a real challenge. This was the motivation for my video. I wanted to demonstrate the collation of that information in a way that someone could follow along with in a reasonable way and ideally improve upon. 

Along the way I gained a better understanding of production configurations and was able to interact with ISC tools which I previously had not seen (i.e. the RecordMapper, FHIR Server, etc.). There are still so many things to explore and experiment with but each twig becomes a branch over time and this is the beginning of a new skill set.

As a companion to the video submission I would like to provide you shady respite in the form of an overview of the steps I took in order to build out my solution with links to the appropriate sections of the video:

1. Configure your FHIR server endpoint
2. Create a record mapping using your sample data
3. Configure your custom data transformation
4. Build your production components
5. Configure your production components

While I hope that this can be useful to you I know that I have much growth ahead of me. I hope that we can all continue to help and support one another.