The Three Best Lessons My Teammates Taught Me as a New Developer

I’ve been writing software professionally for a few years now, and I’ve been reflecting on the skills my co-workers told me would be useful when I first started working here. Writing quality software takes a lot of skills, and it can be overwhelming to decide which ones to focus on first.

Three Guidelines for Using the Functional Module Pattern for TypeScript

TypeScript is a wonderful language for designing data-driven applications. The type system is suited to describe the many different shapes and transformations of data as it travels from one end of a system to another. As my team has gained more experience with TypeScript, we’ve developed some guidelines for creating typed modules that help the […]

Type-Driven Development – Replacing Unit Tests with Types in Typescript

Being explicit about the return type of the function is the most under-utilized feature of TypeScript. At least, that’s true for the way I write my code. When I first started using TypeScript, I was really impressed with the way it inferred the return type of the function, and having these types perpetuate throughout the […]

Why You Should Avoid Writing Complex SQL Queries – and What to Do Instead

If you’ve worked with a piece of software that talks to a database, chances are you’ve come across a long SQL query. Slowly, your eyes glaze over as you attempt to reason through the many joins and subqueries, trying to figure out if this query is the source of the bug. You debate between the […]

Three Things to Remember when Ramping in New Team Members

Having new team members join a project is an exciting time, but it can often be difficult. Projects can have a huge variety of things to learn: new technologies, application architecture patterns, business models, etc., so it’s good to find a balance between ramping them up quickly and overwhelming them.

Managing Data Loaders in Node.js with Shared State

When developing software, it’s always tough to work with caching. While my team appreciates the efficiencies that Data Loader can provide for applications, we still struggle with the same problems that always come up when caching queries, mainly invalidating caches when a data set has changed.

Mocking TypeScript Modules with Sinon

Lately, my team has been looking for better ways to create and maintain mocks in our TypeScript project. In particular, we wanted an easy way to mock out modules that we built using Sinon.JS.

Lifting Functions into Promises in JavaScript

When working on a JavaScript project, I usually spend a lot of time around promises. Lately, I’ve been using this helpful function called liftP that makes working with promises a little bit easier.

Building a Family Tree with GraphQL – Part 2: Adding New Resolvers

In my last post, I described how you can build flexible APIs with GraphQL, using a family tree API as my demonstration. The implementation of the API was fairly simple, and I was able to traverse the graph of relationships between different people in the data set. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how we can […]

Building a Family Tree With GraphQL – Part 1: Creating a Simple GraphQL API

Over the past year, I’ve been working with GraphQL to build APIs. GraphQL is a query language that allows for flexible endpoints for servers, giving consumers the power to control what data they are receiving.

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Andy Peterson

Author: Andy Peterson