Michael Marsiglia | Atomic Spin

Lightweight Data-driven Project Management Presentation

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: June 25, 2011

What is the presentation about? Carl and I will be presenting about the use of burn-up charts as a vital element of data-driven project management. Atomic has been using this simple technique for more than five years. Burn-up charts are a lightweight method of tracking a team’s progress toward completing a project. Burn-up charts do...

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Posted in Community, Events, News | Tagged agile project management, burn-up chart, data-driven project management | Leave a comment

Do not pass strings to Excel’s NETWORKDAYS function

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: May 14, 2011

NETWORKDAYS is an Excel function that returns the number of whole working days between two dates. When doing our quarterly financial analysis we commonly utilize this function for various calculations. Unfortunately, it is easy to misuse this function if you pass it strings instead of dates. The misuse can easily go unnoticed because the answer…

Posted in Design & Development | 1 Comment

Lean Startup event comes to Grand Rapids

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: April 18, 2011

Entrepreneurs, investors, and product managers: Are you looking for a way to improve the chances of your product’s success? Okay so it’s a pretty rhetorical question, right? Of course you want to improve your chances for success. Lucky for you some really smart people have been creating a framework to help. It is called the…

Posted in Business of Software, News, Startups | Tagged grand rapids | 1 Comment

wkhtmltopdf and Rails

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: March 17, 2011

Earlier this week Dustin Tinney and I needed to add simple pdf generation support to a Rails application. We queried the Atomic Brain Trust for advice and were told to check out wkhtmltopdf. wkhtmltopdf is a simple shell utility that converts html to pdf using the webkit rendering engine, and Qt. After downloading the application…

Posted in Design & Development, Web | Tagged ruby on rails | 3 Comments

Working at Atomic

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: February 1, 2011

Our software product development process requires hardworking and happy developers, designers, and testers. Currently, we’re looking to hire web, application and mobile developers, embedded developers, user experience/visual designers, and exploratory testers. If you believe you would be a positive addition to our molecule please apply here. Why work at Atomic Let’s start by getting the…

Posted in Business of Software, Company, Culture, News | 5 Comments

iOS Distribution Methods

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: December 29, 2010

There are three main ways to distribute iOS applications. Each has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. App Store The mainstream way of distributing applications. People find, purchase, and download your app directly from the App Store, an application that is preinstalled on their device by Apple. This method of distribution make sense if…

Posted in Business of Software, Mobile | 1 Comment

Updating PhoneGap’s ChildBrowser plugin to handle local files

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: December 7, 2010

Recently, I have been working on an iPad sales tool application with Shawn Crowley and Marissa Christy. We are using a framework called PhoneGap to build the application. PhoneGap allows us to write the majority of the app using HTML and JavaScript. HTML and JavaScript have been excellent for 95% of the application, but these…

Posted in Mobile | 34 Comments

5 Reasons to Attend a Conference

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: November 9, 2010

At Atomic Object we have a very simple and generous policy for attending conferences: simply identify the conference you want to attend, defend why the conference is a good fit, and sign up. Atomic covers registration, lodging, and flights. Through the first 3 quarters of 2010 we have already invested over $45,000 in conferences. This…

Posted in Process & Practices | 3 Comments

Drawing with your customer

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: September 28, 2010

Some of my colleagues attended the Agile 2010 Conference. When groups of people return to Atomic after a conference they take time to present the interesting things that they learned at the conference to the rest of the team. The most interesting thing that I learned from their presentation was the idea of doing rapid…

Posted in Process & Practices, Prototyping | 7 Comments

Native App Vs. Mobile Friendly Web Application

By Michael Marsiglia | Published: August 24, 2010

There are two main ways to create mobile applications. The following post lays out advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. Native Apps – applications that are installed directly on smart phone devices (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc.). Advantages Cool Factor – “There’s an app for that.” Being in the Apple App Store or Google Android App…