Prepping for the Pitch

By Matt Fletcher | Published: February 11, 2012
About a week ago I had a wonderful opportunity – I gave one of the five pitches at the January 2012 5×5 Night. Mike Marsiglia, myself, and three others have been working on a side product for about a year now1 and I pitched it at 5×5. We were planning to use the money to...

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window.location as a global variable

By Matt Fletcher | Published: January 21, 2012
Lately I’ve been building web applications with quite a bit of the app implemented on the client side with JavaScript. Backbone.js has been handy in building these applications. Here I’ll be sharing my experience building up Backbone Routers, and how I’ve come to prefer an event-based mechanism for page navigation over setting the window.location directly....

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Why we test

By Matt Fletcher | Published: December 25, 2011
A recent experience reminded me of why we employ test-driven development. I’ve been practicing TDD for about six years now. That’s certainly not as long as many people have, but I have enough experience that I’d call myself an expert. I don’t need to be sold on it; in fact, I’m often in a role...

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Posted in Culture, Design & Development, Testing | Tagged | 1 Comment

Podcasts geeks will find interesting (and why they strengthen our culture)

By Matt Fletcher | Published: December 6, 2011
Atomic is not a boring or quiet place. That’s not a coincidence. We have an open and transparent office environment. We’re passionate about what we do. We love working with the people we work with. We’re smart people. We enjoy exchanging ideas. Of course, we spend a lot of free time keeping up on the...

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JRuby, Torquebox, and Rails presentation from GR DevDay 2011

By Matt Fletcher | Published: November 7, 2011
This weekend I gave a talk at GR DevDay 2011 titled JRuby, Torquebox, and Rails. Overall it went well – plenty of practice meant I got the timing just right. I’m sure the walls in my kitchen are thankful they don’t need to listen to motivations for JRuby anymore. The talk was largely a reprise...

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Atomic and GR DevDay

By Matt Fletcher | Published: October 10, 2011
GR DevDay is a one-day, local tech conference coming up on November 5th. The speakers have been selected and it looks like there will be about 33 sessions this year. Atomic will be speaking at three sessions: Carl Erickson is presenting the keynote “Happy Makers Make Happy Customers.” Mike Swieton’s talk is titled “Build Ruby...

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Rails routes in Javascript with js-routes

By Matt Fletcher | Published: October 3, 2011
One thing that has annoyed me historically is hitting our Rails routes from Javascript. I’ve either sent the route down with other JSON data or simply typed the right string into the Javascript code. Both solutions work but I was never wild about them. Now we’ve been using the js-routes library for a couple of...

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BarCamp GR 2011

By Matt Fletcher | Published: August 22, 2011
Last Friday I participated in BarCamp GR 2011 at nearby Calvin College. I’ve attended previous BarCamps, but I hadn’t presented. This year I presented twice. The first presentation I was semi-prepared for: one of our interns last summer, Daniel Hast, did a couple of lunchtime talks on the basics of dynamic programming. Since he did...

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JRuby, Rails, and Torquebox presentation at August DetroitRuby

By Matt Fletcher | Published: August 12, 2011
Last evening I gave a 45 minute presentation to the DetroitRuby group about our experiences building a web application with JRuby, Rails, and Torquebox. Here is a link to the presentation. The presentation went well and the group enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to further engagements wirth DetroitRuby, whether it be visiting them again or...

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Birdbath updated to handle both Rails.root and RAILS_ROOT

By Matt Fletcher | Published: August 9, 2011
I just update the birdbath Ruby gem to properly handle either the RAILS_ROOT constant or Rails.root object. Rails 3.1 has removed the constant. Birdbath is a gem to aid in testing ActiveRecord migrations. Take a peek at the project on GitHub for more information. Edit: corrected typo
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