Drew Colthorp on Atomic Spin

The 10-Box Exercise: Where Estimate Rubber Hits the Calendar Road

The 10-box exercise is an agile planning tool that helps the team visualize the sprint schedule and account for how the actual calendar impacts delivery.

Project & Team Management

Compound Developer Time with Attention to Detail

Pay attention to the details and specifics. Make sure your specific X is actually good for your project, your client, and your team.

Project & Team Management

Use the Compounding Nature of Developer Time to Deliver Value

Developer time compounds like interest in a bank account. The better the team, the better the interest rate of investment in the team's software.

Planning Your Project

Great Software Requires Both Managing Risk and Exploiting Opportunities

Great software development projects require building a skill at identifying and exploiting opportunities while also managing risks.

Development Practices

A Code Smell Heuristic: Polluted by the Precipitant

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself leaning on a useful new code smell I’ve stumbled across, one I call being "Polluted by the Precipitant."

Personal Optimization

How a Design Thinking Exercise Solved a Chronic Note-taking Problem

I want a way of taking notes about these possibilities and occasionally reviewing them when I’m looking for a spark of inspiration.

TypeScript

Modeling Permissions as Types in Typescript

TypeScript makes it easy to eliminate potential sources of error. We’ve been using some simple techniques to do this with permissions checking.

Development Practices

6 Things to Consider when Adding a New Project Dependency

Dependencies are liabilities, and not all of them are worth the risk. The next time you're deciding whether to add one, ask yourself these six questions.

Development Practices

Changing Unfamiliar Code? First, Seek to Understand

The next time you feel frustrated with someone else’s code that you need to change, first make sure you’re not actually the source of the problem.

Web Apps

The Single-Valued Type Pattern for TypeScript

Want flexible, extensible APIs that can work with a many concrete types at runtime? Use this pattern to create APIs that are precisely typed and flexible.

React / Redux

Better TypeScript Types for Redux Saga’s “Call” Effect

The "call" effect in Redux Saga can't be inferred automatically by TypeScript. Use this type to explicitly infer call effect return types and get the value TypeScript provides.

Software Science

Redux, Modularity, and the Law of Demeter

Lessons learned from object-oriented programming help point the way to better ways of structuring Redux-based applications.

Drew Colthorp

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