CircleCI vs. Azure Pipelines: A Comparative Analysis

I’ve recently had the unique opportunity to work with both CircleCI and Azure Pipelines at the same time on one project. In this post, I’ll compare and contrast my experiences using these two tools. If you’re trying to decide between the two, I hope you can benefit from my experience. Context & Caveats You should […]

Four Ways to Make Your Next Rails Upgrade Smoother

Major Ruby on Rails upgrades can be a headache when your project has a lot of dependencies or gets too far out of date. I’m pretty new to the Ruby and Rails ecosystems. And when I had to perform upgrades on several projects recently, I was disappointed by the lack of guidance available. To be […]

Consulting Under Pressure

Every developer has had late nights of debugging seemingly impossible problems. And every consultant has been through crucial conversations explaining their reasoning for tough decisions. Those of us who are software developers and consultants get all the highs and lows of both. High-pressure consulting situations can be tricky to navigate in the heat of the […]

Localhost to Remote in Two Commands

Do you feel too constrained by localhost? Need a quickly-deployed remote demo? Localtunnel may be the tool for you. Localtunnel is a simple tool that provides you a publicly-accessible URL that reroutes every request to your locally-running process

Digging into Android: Intents and Sharing

If you have spent much time with Android development, you have likely run across Android’s Intent object. Intents show up pretty regularly in the official Android tutorials and frequently appear in StackOverflow answers. Until recently, all I knew about them was that they were used in everything from navigation within an application to media playback […]

Lessons Learned from Deploying Outside my Comfort Zone

If your team hasn’t yet reached the utopia of a fully automated deployment pipeline, you likely have a series of steps or scripts that you perform for every deployment. Perhaps this process is documented somewhere, or maybe (more likely) it’s just passed down from developer to developer through tribal knowledge.

Seamless Integration of Android’s Soft Keyboard

Recently, I was working on a feature for an application where the user would interact with Android’s soft keyboard. I found working with this keyboard to be more confusing than I would have expected for such a ubiquitous feature. Baked into most Android smartphones, it is highly customizable, but at the cost of making some […]

They Say, “Everything Is a Signal.” But What Exactly Is a Reactive Signal?

During my introduction to reactive programming, I was shown a giant reactive codebase and told, “Everything is a signal.” Of course, my first question was, “What is a signal?” In my opinion, this question is the sticking point for many reactive tutorials and explanations. Is a pipeline a good analogy for a signal? Maybe an […]

Tools for Learning About New Tech Communities

After deciding to explore a career in software development, I recognized that, beyond general programming experience, I had no real exposure to the industry. I didn’t know anything more than a surface-level description of the job title. I lacked knowledge about the culture, trends, and lingo of the industry. I wanted to gain exposure, but […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Brian May

Author: Brian May