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I’ve been working on a project using Rails lately, and one of the most challenging things about it has been trying to make the tests run efficiently. Unfortunately, there’s so much setup to get the Rails environment going that simple little unit tests take about 5 seconds to run. Of that 5 seconds, it takes…
There’s been a lot of news lately regarding Apple and its relationship with manufacturers and suppliers, particularly Foxconn. A lot of Atoms are big Apple junkies, but as a group we are very into sustainability, so of course it was quite troubling to hear that my iPhone might be the result of someone’s back-breaking shift…
Higher-level languages are great, but every now and then I like some good old C++. So I was a bit excited when I got the chance to use C++ recently on a piece of demo software. After spending a lot of time in Ruby and Javascript (or more accurately, Coffeescript), it was both comforting and…
A few months ago I started working on a project where we wanted to use WebSockets. The technology seemed well-designed and lightweight, it enjoyed strong support from existing browsers, and we quickly found an implementation in Ruby to use for our server: em-websocket. The problem was, we also wanted a Ruby-based client. Our client environment…
Recently I’ve been working on a project combining an HTTP server and a WebSockets server. Traffic from both HTTP and WebSocket clients can affect server state and consequently an HTTP client can affect a WebSockets client and vice-versa. We are prototyping this in JRuby as a single .war file using warble. The HTTP server is…
I’ve been with Atomic for about a month now. That time has been many things: exciting, challenging, engaging, and fun. Perhaps chiefly, it has been a whirlwind tour over a vast array of technologies, languages, and concepts. Here is a small subset: test-driven development, extreme programming, vim, Ruby, jQuery, Coffeescript, Cucumber, WebSockets, EventMachine, web application…
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object