For those uninitiated to agile software development, “a spike solution is a very simple program to explore potential solutions” to a particularly challenging problem. This term and definition comes from XP Explained by Kent Beck, and it is still as relevant today as it ever was.
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Author: Dan Kelch
How I Learned to Love (or at Least Like) Pair Programming
Some people are naturally inclined to pair. Not me. My brain is all over the place when I code, so it’s difficult to focus energy on solving the problem at hand while explaining my reasoning and approaches to my pair.
This thing is, pair programming is a highly-regarded and widely-practiced convention here at Atomic. When I started here, I had never paired before. And I was quite surprised to see both how effective it was for others, and how difficult it was for me.
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Clojure Development in Spacemacs
I’ve recently been doing some basic Clojure development, and it’s been a huge blast. I’ve played around with it in the past, but never bothered to fully set up a development environment. This time, however, I decided to spend a few evenings perfecting my workflow and becoming familiar with the tools available, focusing on my editor of choice: Spacemacs.
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Tired of Your Shell? Try Zsh!
I’ve been a Zsh user for several years now, and I figured that I would share my experience. For those who haven’t heard of it, Zsh is a command line shell, similar to Bash, but with many more built-in features. Many features of Zsh are available with Bash or other shells; however, Zsh does such a great job out of the box. Read more on Tired of Your Shell? Try Zsh!…
IDE Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
If you have ever found yourself working on iOS and Android projects, you’ve probably had to decide which IDE or text editor to use. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of options to choose from when it comes to native projects; however, this means that choosing an IDE is significantly easier. Android Studio is a great choice for Android development, and if you want to keep your environment consistent, AppCode is an excellent product.
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Getting Started with AppleScript
As a consultant, I do my best to be as efficient as possible. I want to provide the greatest value I can, and one of the ways of doing this is by cutting down the repetition in my workflow. If I find myself doing a task frequently, I try to shorten the time it takes to do it, or to automate it completely. Recently, I have been exploring AppleScript, which is a very powerful tool available to anyone running OS X.
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Learning from Pokémon GO: The Importance of Testing
Automated testing is one of the most powerful tools available to a software developer, but some people are reluctant to embrace it. With the release of Pokémon GO and its bugs seen in the first several weeks, this is a good time to discuss the importance of releasing quality code into production.
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