Alex Zurek on Atomic Spin

Three Strategies For Implementing Large Stories

Breaking up a large story into smaller stories can prove to be difficult, especially when implementing only a small portion of it isn't possible without leaving the application in

Development Practices

The Case for Succinct Build Logs

Build logs should run efficiently instead of drowning you in data, and they should still be useful once the app is running in a production environment. "Verbose mode" should not be

Growing as Makers

Four Essential Tips for Easy Project Onboarding

Every project contains an intricate set of variables, processes, and tools that make them successful, and it’s your job to learn all of them by yesterday.

Growing as Makers

How Markdown Helps Me Take Better, Faster Notes

Note-taking in Markdown, using either Bear or VSCode, has helped me stay more focused and take better notes during meetings.

Growing as Makers

When to Stop Learning New Programming Languages

Knowing which languages to learn is a version of the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. The answer is an ongoing cycle of exploration and exploitation.

Developer Tools

There’s More Than One Way to Edit Text

I wanted to discover different ways to quickly edit my file, each faster than making all of the necessary changes manually. Here are a few I discovered.

Development Practices

TODO Comments Don’t Work

Comments, without a large amount of maintenance overhead, tend to become stale and misleading. TODO comments are no different.

Developer Tools

Clojure Development with Visual Studio Code

Learning Emacs while also attempting to learn Clojure was too much all at once. So I decided to try out Visual Studio Code (VS Code) with Clojure.

Ember.js

Making Your Ember Application Livable

Three ways I'm applying the idea of Livable Code to my current Ember project: regular expressions, frequent tests, and gradual refactoring.

Development Practices

Three Benefits of Automating Development

By abstracting away mundane tasks, we're able to use more of our mental resources to tackle the problems we intended to solve in the first place

Developer Tools

Bringing Rails-Like Migrations to JavaScript with Knex.js

With a little intuition and a lot of help from Google, we stumbled upon Knex.js—an SQL query builder that is meant to be flexible, portable, and fun to use.

Development Practices

Escaping the South Indian Monkey Trap

In The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler got me thinking about "value rigidity" in software dev through his exploration of the South Indian Monkey Trap.

Alex Zurek

Keep up with our latest posts.