January 2012 | Atomic Spin

Developer Tools

Less Perplexing Terminal Multiplexing with tmux

As a professional problem solver, I spend a considerable portion of my day working at a command prompt within a terminal multiplexer called tmux.

Developer Tools

Safeguarding Your Productivity with Backups

Make a bootable backup of your hard drive so that you can quickly recover in the event of a hard drive failure and maintain your productivity.

UX/Design Practices

Understand Design or Fail

I often use “Big D Design” to distinguish Strategy and Process from the Tangible, where I often use “Visual Design” to describe the craft.

Development Practices

Designers Are More Valuable than Programmers

Insights as to how developers practice design and an assertion of the diminishing value of the "coder" mindset.

Developer Tools

Highlight Strings in Cucumber Features with Vim

An "after" syntax file that adds highlighting to double quoted strings in Cucumber feature files when using tpope's vim-cucumber plugin.

Web Apps

window.location as a Global Variable

Why I've chosen to avoid setting window.location directly, and how I've avoided it using Backbone's structures.

iOS / OS X

Mobile Safari on iOS 5.1 Unexpectedly Making Cross Origin Resource Sharing Requests

My Ajax calls were failing and I saw my application logs containing many requests with the HTTP verb "OPTIONS". I narrowed it to oddities with PDFs on Safari.

UX/Design Practices

Usability Testing Field Notes

Some thoughts about what it takes to put together a successful usability testing session.

Evolving the Industry

A Modern Web Development Syllabus

A list of resources, books, and tutorials to bring a computer scientist up to speed with the latest tools and practices used in modern web development.

Evolving the Industry

Diversity – A Powerful Force for Innovation

Scott Page's book: The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies offers a compelling argument for diversity as a powerful force fo

Web Apps

Say it Again: CRUD is not REST

Nick Sutterer makes a great case for separating CRUD from REST, and also touches on the important interface constraints of the REST architectural style.

C & C++

Using CMock when C is Oversensitive

Employing CMock is usually straightforward. Here are a few common sticking points I've come across and how you can work around them.