Atomic Spin :: Elements of Software

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.

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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

I’ve been tracking the Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework technology scene lately.

That’s a broad category. As the technology is put to use, its applicability grows into other domains. Mobile or otherwise-embedded devices, set-top boxes or game consoles, tables, and stand-alone or kiosk applications are all targets now. Web applications are still the largest niche for RIA platforms, so I’ve compiled a list of the web-oriented technologies for comparison. Since I most enjoy writing web applications in Ruby, I’m tracking the way each platform supports Ruby integration—specifically Ruby on Rails.

Here are the contenders, in order of fitness for web application development, according to my own opinion:

Read the rest of this entry

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

The video is available on ARCast.TV. The audio is available from ARCast Radio.