Your Backlog Isn’t a To-Do List – It’s Self-fulfilling Prophecy of Success or Failure

Your backlog is an imperfect, always changing, self-fulfilling prophecy for how your software will be built. Not only that, but at a software consultancy like Atomic, it’s also a prophecy for how the engagement will end and deliver on your brand promise. All this to say: Tending to the backlog is one of the most […]

“Understanding TypeScript’s Structural Type System” at Strange Loop 2018

I'm super excited to be giving a talk about TypeScript at Strange Loop this year! The talk, “Understanding TypeScript's Structural Type System,” covers some of the deeper and most exciting ideas at the heart of TypeScript's namesake feature. You can get an overview from the slides. (I'll post a link to the video once it's […]

Project Team Roles at Atomic – The Tech Lead

Successful product delivery requires us to navigate overlapping, competing concerns across a broad spectrum of execution dimensions, all tied together via our tech lead role. This role is complex and multifaceted, requiring the people who hold it to balance a variety of needs and interests.

Your Dev Project Is a Classroom; Be Intentional about Learning

If you’re like me, you always learn something new on a project, but it’s usually incidental. Your focus is on writing code, and the learning just kind of… happens. I’m here to tell you that you’re wasting a great opportunity. Your colleagues have a lot to teach you—and a lot to learn from you. A […]

Statically Typed Data Validation with JSON Schema and TypeScript

One super common problem on TypeScript projects is figuring out how to validate data from external sources and tie that validated data to TypeScript types. In these situations, you generally have a few options: Define types and validations separately, and type them together with Type Guards. Use an internal DSL such as io-ts to build […]

Coordinated Cache Refill with Redis and Node

After launching a new Node.js app we built as part of a recent redesign for a high-volume site, we found some performance problems occurring every five minutes:

Flavoring: Flexible Nominal Typing for TypeScript

Recently, we’ve been making heavy use of TypeScript at Atomic Object. We love the great tooling and instant feedback we get with the language’s powerful type system. TypeScript’s structural type system gives us a lot of powerful tools for making invalid states unrepresentable, thereby pointing out bugs at compile time instead of runtime. However, one […]

A Simple, Functional Module Pattern for TypeScript

We’ve been using TypeScript with our React apps quite a bit recently. One common need that we have when programming in a functional style is a good pattern for creating small abstractions that can be used widely in an application.

Small, Simple, Functional Lenses for TypeScript

Building apps in Redux requires frequent updates to nested immutable data structures–something that’s not particularly natural in TypeScript or JavaScript.

A New Redux Action Pattern for TypeScript 2.4+

In September 2016, I wrote a post about a pattern for strongly typed Redux reducers in TypeScript. Since then, the TypeScript team has been busy enhancing the language, and recent changes in TypeScript have enabled a much more natural, boilerplate-free pattern for strongly typed actions and reducers in TypeScript.

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Drew Colthorp

Author: Drew Colthorp