Atomic Spin :: Elements of Software

More client news:

The idea came to Rick DeVos while he listened to church leaders describe how they were going to use email to help people get involved in church activities.

“It seemed like a nightmare of useless emails filling up everyone’s mailboxes, and an administrative nightmare,” DeVos says. The more he thought about it, the more he realized there was no online tool to help organizations connect people in need with the people who could help.

So DeVos talked to Ben Gott and the two created TheCommon.org, an online site that helps people lend a helping hand.

Grand Rapids innovators develop online ‘helping hand’

Client news:

So far the 2-year-old firm based out of Franklin has three full-time employees and has raised more than $1.3 million in seed money from venture capital firms and angel investors.

CircleBuilder, which offers Yahoo Groups-like services to churches, is about to bring in another “big chunk of change” as it prepares to close another round of seed money investing. The firm hopes to open its site to the general public this summer and hire 15-20 people by the end of next year.

“I am trying to do all of my business in Michigan,” Brown says. “My lawyers, CPA and technology firm [that’s us! -ed.] are in Michigan. You have got to start something in this state because we’re too reliant on the auto industry.”

CircleBuilder paces its growth, looks to add 15-20 jobs in two years

I resisted the urge for a pun about meeting the "Atoms Family" or some cringe-inducing line.

We've had some new Atoms join the Molecule (Nate Lokers & Eric Hass). And, we decided it was time to update everybody's bios on our website. We get really positive feedback from customers and potential customers about our bios. The visibility into our company and culture via the bios seems to really connect well with the outside world. So much so that we give periodic attention to them and always feature them as a link on our website's front page.

So, feel free to poke around and meet the Atomic Object Molecule.

We continue to look for good people to hire. If you're interested, start the process.

The Molecule needs more good Atoms. We’re looking for solid generalist developers and especially those with strong working knowledge of web programming.

Atomic Object people are more than technical wizards; they’re also proficient in writing, managing changing requirements, working directly with clients, and satisfying customers. They care about good code, create tools to make tasks easier, are skilled at problem solving, think testing is essential and not optional, and know how to learn the things they don’t know.

If you’re comfortable with anything from web to desktop to systems programming, have a good working knowledge of databases, already know several languages and enjoy learning new ones, and are handy with more than one operating system, then you might just be the kind of proficient generalist we’re looking for.

If you can analyze web applications down to the HTTP protocol, think in terms of interaction design, and roll your eyes when you see HTML listed as a programming language, you might be the kind of web-savvy developer in whom we’re interested. We look for depth in our developers – much more than only a resume dripping with a web-flavored alphabet soup of acronyms.

Poke around our site and this blog to learn about us.

» Start the Hiring process.

The Great Lakes IT Report posted the news.

From the press release love:

Said CircleBuilder co-founder and CEO Howard Brown: “We went through an extensive RFP process and chose Atomic Object because of its world-class Ruby-on-Rails and test driven / agile development experience. The AO team builds scalable, well tested software and Internet applications. It is an added bonus that Atomic Object is based in western Michigan.”

Said Atomic Object president Carl Erickson: “CircleBuilder is such an exciting project for us. Our team loves building the highest quality of software and the fact that CircleBuilder’s interactive Web service will help churches and faith-based organizations grow, prosper and better connect with their members is amazing.”

We just submitted a SkipJack payment gateway implementation for the ActiveMerchant project. ActiveMerchant is a Ruby library for dealing with credit cards, payment processing and shipping. It’s currently the most popular payment processing library for Ruby. SkipJack is a payment processing and financial services company.

Our SkipJack gateway is now available in the trunk of the ActiveMerchant repository.

Cody Fauser (ActiveMerchant maintainer) also announced Shopify’s support for the new SkipJack gateway.

The gateway supports all the standard features of all ActiveMerchant gateways: authorization, purchase, capture, void, credit and status operations. More details are available at the original submission post.

Rapid Growth is a very cool, weekly online magazine covering the development and transformation of Grand Rapids. They published a short article about us.

“GR software firm’s growth projections anything but atomic“

We started working with a really interesting new client recently, Realius. Realius is a new gaming site specializing in Fantasy Real Estate™. We’re their application development team.

Realius’ Fantasy Real Estate games use real-world data to drive the games. Realius has some big plans and cool ideas; it will be really interesting to see how things unfold. A significant update to their first game Price Me Now™ will be available soon. See their website and blog.

The very first post on the Realius blog explains just one of the intriguing values of their approach:

“I wished I could have played with my ideas to better understand the market before cutting the real check. As a result, we are designing Realius Fantasy Real Estate™ games to follow the homeowner life cycle so that we can have fun with real estate and learn in the process of playing games. The premise is – if you are good at Fantasy Real Estate™, you’ll be good at reality real estate.”

Realius’ games rely on real-world real estate data and listings. As time goes on and more games are developed, local search and geo-aware data will become more and more important. Wired magazine has a couple interesting articles on where local search has been and where it’s going: Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World & Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future.

Methods & Tools is a quarterly software development e-publication with a distribution list of 45,000. The summer edition of Methods & Tools is now available. It includes an article on our embedded development approach and tools (the PDF version can be found at the preceding link).

Over the last year I’ve been working on a Ruby extension for Measurement Computing’s miniLAB 1008 device; version 1.0.0 is now available on Rubyforge.

miniLAB is a simple analog and digital input and output device we’ve used to help system test our embedded projects. The minilab Ruby extension wraps the miniLAB’s native C library into something addressable by Ruby. I’ve also simplified the interface so that you can refer to the miniLAB’s pins by their labeled name rather than their assigned C constant (for those unfamiliar, the label on the device and the actual value you’d pass to the C library are often wildly different).

Interest in Presenter First seems to be really growing. We’ve received lots of response lately through our blog and website. No doubt, this is thanks in large part to Ron Jacobs of ARCast and his recent series of Podcasts.

Brian Harleton (one of the originators of Presenter First and an author of the Agile 2006 Presenter First paper) forwarded on a link to something very interesting he came across today:

TDD for Both Stand-alone GUI-based application And Eclipse Plug-in Development”

These case studies were conducted by Li Le and Li Meng, two students of School of Computing, Dublin City University.

The conclusion of the study has this to say:

“Through all the case studies we did and the experience we had to develop this plug-in, it can be proved that presenter first TDD is an excellent software development method used to develop both Stand-alone GUI-based applications and Eclipse Plug-ins.”

Ron Jacobs recently spent a morning with Dave Crosby & Scott Miller talking about Presenter First and recorded the conversation for his Podcast.

Original post

Part 1: video audio

Part 2: video audio

Part 3: video audio

The Molecule needs a couple more good Atoms. We’re looking for a solid generalist developer and an experienced embedded developer.

Atomic Object people are more than technical wizards; they’re also proficient in writing, managing changing requirements, working directly with clients, and satisfying customers. They care about good code, create tools to make tasks easier, are skilled at problem solving, think testing is essential and not optional, and know how to learn the things they don’t know.

If you’re comfortable with anything from web to desktop to systems programming, have a good working knowledge of databases, already know several languages and enjoy learning new ones, and are handy with more than one operating system, then you might just be the kind of proficient generalist we’re looking for.

If you can use an oscilloscope to analyze a protocol problem, have written driver code for flash memory devices, are interested in applying Test-Driven Development to firmware development, and aren’t afraid of development work on both ends of the wire (i.e. embedded and high-level software), then you might just be the type of embedded developer we’d like to meet.

Poke around our site and this blog to learn about us.

» Start the process.

Bill Bereza and Matt Fletcher will be presenting 'Improving the Embedded Development Process' at OSCON this summer. The talk will focus on our experience building the Ruby tools that made embedded development effective and fun for us.

Check out the abstract here. If you're interested, consider coming to OSCON. Aside from our presentation, which will surely be the best thing ever, there will be plenty of other interesting talks. A complete OSCON schedule can be found at this link.

Ron Jacobs recently spent a morning with Dave Crosby & Scott Miller talking about Presenter First and recorded the conversation for his Podcast.

Original post

Part 1: video audio

Part 2: video audio