RSchema-Hamster: Schemas for Shaping Immutable Data

RSchema-Hamster is a Ruby gem that lets you use Hamster’s persistent data structures to define and validate the shape of your data via RSchema. What for? In order to clarify my designs, reduce mistakes, and leave code easier to change than when I found it, I: Strive to program with immutable data Learn to apply […]

Managing Complex Permissions in CanCanCan for Rails

We’re using the CanCanCan authorization gem to control access to resources in our current Rails project. It’s a great way to get started and covers a lot of ground with its basic and extended syntaxes, and it has decent support for adding more complex permissions checks that may not fit into more conventional patterns. It’s […]

Is Presenter First Still Valuable to Modern App Architecture?

Thijs van Dien wrote to us in early 2015 with some great questions about Presenter First’s place in application architecture in the post-MVC era. His well-researched questions were a joy to respond to; while there’ve been many advances in desktop and mobile programming patterns since we first wrote about PF back in 2007, we still […]

Test Everything! (on Validating our Work)

Carl Erickson, our CEO, said it best: I think one of Atomic’s unspoken values is that of validation. We don’t assume; we show. We experiment to learn. We don’t rest until we can show we’re done, and it’s done right. Through validation, we drive out as much risk as is possible and makes sense.

Empowering Our Clients to Deploy Their Own Apps

This was me at a recent sprint review meeting with the Local Orbit team: What really got me excited during this sprint was our success in implementing continuous delivery. For each feature we delivered, Anna was able to test and approve it before promoting the code, pushing to staging, and deploying to production. We went […]

Kanban for a 4th Grader: Task Cards of Happiness

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me I’ve scribbled on and recycled about 30,000 3×5 task cards since starting at Atomic in 2001. They’re such a pervasive tool here that we’ve got our own branded variety littering both offices. Their use varies from project to project, month-to-month, but they’ve never gone away, even though we’ve used […]

Time-Based Estimates Are for Suckers! (Size-based Is the Way to Go)

I gave a talk entitled “Time-Based Estimates Are For Suckers! Size-based is The Way to Go” at this year’s GLSEC on April 29. It’s meant as a call to action for those who haven’t made the leap to size-based estimation, or who have been beaten back by some of the challenges you’ll encounter when trying, […]

Pair Programming Is Built on Crucial Conversations

Atomic has added Crucial Conversations to our short list of required reading, meaning new hires will be expected to digest this book within their first weeks on the job. We think it’s important enough to rank right up there with Extreme Programming Explained (1st edition!) as a book that explains how we work and what […]

Defining Immutable Record Types in Ruby with Hamsterdam

Hamsterdam is a Ruby gem that lets you define and use your own immutable record types in Ruby, based on Hamster’s immutable Hamster::Hash. Think Struct with a Hash-friendly constructor… but you can’t change any of the fields within the object once it’s created. I’ve been enjoying Hamster on some recent Ruby and JRuby projects, but […]

JrSerialPort: Connect to a Serial Port in JRuby via RXTX

When porting some Ruby code over to JRuby for a prototype I’ve been working on recently, I ran into a small hiccup that I should have seen coming but wasn’t originally very worried about: my app talks over a serial port via ruby-serialport. The serialport gem is built with native code, as Bundler was kind […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: David Crosby

Author: David Crosby