Technical Practices Why Vagrant? – Preventing Deployment Issues from Day One with a Virtual Machine Vagrant virtual machines help developers prevent deployment issues by allowing them to write code in production-like environments.
News & Events Saying Goodbye to Maja We lost a member of the Atomic family recently. Maja, my 11-year-old Siberian Husky, reached the end of her long, happy dog life.
Developer Tools Increasing Pivotal Tracker Usability with Shorter IDs Shorter IDs makes it easier to find stories your Pivotal Tracker backlog, so I used Pivotal's REST API to create custom IDs.
DevOps & System Admin. Simpler Deploys with git Subtrees Using subtrees can help work around specific limitations in Heroku and enforce proper separation of concerns.
Business Practices Wanted: New Atoms At Atomic, we measure technical ability not on what we need right now, but on the candidates' understanding of the tools they claim to know.
Project & Team Management A Checklist for Great Feature Requirements 4 guidelines for writing story requirements that won't make your engineers want to pull their hair out.
Embedded Systems 2 Ways to Use Single-Member structs in C Use C structs to preserve array size information and make built-in types stronger.
UX/Design Practices 4 Reasons Designers Should Be Coding Many tools make it easy for designers to get by without coding, but you miss out on greater opportunities to connect with the medium of your end product.
Developer Tools Xcode Efficiency Tips: Keyboard Shortcuts Xcode shortcuts for getting around workspace windows, navigating in the editor, building, running, testing, and debugging.
Growing as Makers Continuous Improvement: Know Yourself, and Know Your Tools! Toolsmithing and tool sharpening will help you get on the path to continuous improvement.
DevOps & System Admin. Using a Smartcard with a VirtualBox-based Vagrant Virtual Machine An easy way to connect my Smartcard reader with a VM running Ubuntu using Vagrant, VirtualBox, and the standard precise64 basebox.
Personal Optimization 4 Ways to Mitigate the Effects of Context Switching Context switching is unavoidable, but you can learn to do it less often and train yourself to get back on track faster after each switch.