Carl Erickson on Atomic Spin

Meeting the Growing Demand for Software Professionals

The U.S. isn't producing enough skilled software professionals. We need more educational opportunities and more encouragement from parents and teachers.

Designing for Users

Research the Extremes of a User Community

Researching the extremes of a user community can be a faster, more efficient way of discovering what matters to all users.

Project & Team Management

Small Teams Are Dramatically More Efficient than Large Teams

Small software teams are dramatically more cost efficient than large teams. Large teams don't even confer much calendar time advantage over small teams.

Business Practices

Interns and Apprentices at Atomic Object

A post about the internship and apprenticeship programs at Atomic Object, their history, and some fun statistics.

Personal Optimization

Copying Charts Reliably out of Numbers

Many important components are lost when you copy and paste a chart from Numbers. This is a work-around to reliably get complete charts out of Numbers and into a graphic file format

Creating a Lean Startup

What We Expect Startups to Know

While there's no magic formula for startup success, there are some basic things we look for in projects we take on as vendors or investors. Ignoring thees things will almost certai

Creating a Lean Startup

Lean Startup Is about More than Shoestring Web Startups

If you only spend less but don’t apply the idea of validated learning you’ll still fail, just with less money having been spent.

Planning Your Project

Spending Too Little Is Worse than Spending Too Much

It’s much worse in a custom software development project to spend 80% of what you need than it is to spend 120% of what you need.

Project & Team Management

Client-only Use of Innovation Games

We use Innovation Games in the initial engagement for product development work with customers.

Planning Your Project

Why We Probably Won’t Sign Your NDA

Entrepreneurs and potential customers sometimes ask us to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as part of figuring out whether we can help them or not.

Technical Practices

Testing Terminology

I have a simple taxonomy for the sorts of tests that developers create: unit, integration, and system.

Planning Your Project

Carl Erickson

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