Never Average Story Points!

When you’re playing Planning Poker with a small software team, it’s pretty easy to reach a consensus. Everyone can be heard, and the team can agree on an acceptable point value for each story. But the larger the team, the harder it is to get everyone on the same page. People stay silent with questions […]

Using SQL to Look Through All of Your iMessage Text Messages

iMessage is one of my favorite things about having an iPhone and a Mac. It’s also one of my least favorite things. I love being able to send messages from my computer, and the integration between the two devices is seamless. What frustrates me is the inability to efficiently search through old messages. iOS 13 […]

Three Reasons to Use Yarn in 2020 (and Beyond)

When Yarn was first released, it was a huge step forward for the JavaScript and NPM community. At the time, NPM did not support deterministic sub-dependency resolution. And Yarn was considerably faster, primarily due to the introduction of an offline cache. These days, however, the gap between Yarn and NPM is much closer. NPM 5 […]

How to Add Custom Functions to a Jest Test Suite

Jest is a fantastic testing framework. Of the many I’ve used across different platforms and languages, it’s the best by a landslide. Jest is fast to learn, easy to use, full of features out of the box, and simple to customize. One of the opportunities to customize your Jest test suite is to add custom […]

Achieve Project-Wide Type Checking with TypeScript and Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio is an excellent integrated development environment (IDE), but sometimes it needs a little hand-holding. Throughout my experience with VS Code, it has never delivered on project-wide type checking and linting. Rather than getting instant feedback from my IDE, I’ve had to rely on my build process as a type checker. Type errors only […]

Creating a Simple Server with Next.js

It can take a long time to get a full-stack React and Node.js app off the ground. Fortunately, with the addition of API Routes, Next.js offers a way to do that in just minutes.

A Simple Bash Script to Find Your Forgotten TODOs

I admit it. I’m one of the worst offenders of the “never leave TODOs” rule. With the intention of quickly finishing a story, I’ll write a TODO comment and then promptly forget about it. Often, a teammate will bring it up again during a code review, and I can address it then. However, there are […]

Making “Root Maker” – My First Experience with Ludum Dare

When I heard that a few of my colleagues were planning on making a game for Ludum Dare, I knew immediately that I had to join them. I’d never tried my hand at game development before, and I figured that I could learn a lot from them. Over the course of a weekend, I learned […]

Enforcing Disjoint Unions with TypeScript Conditional Types

TypeScript 2.8 introduced the conditional type operator, which allows for building comprehensive and powerful types. One of the more useful ones I’ve found is a “disjoint” type, which ensures that there are no elements in common between two sets or objects. This could also be referred to as “mutual exclusion.”

Why I’m Glad I Switched from QWERTY to Colemak

I recently made the switch from a QWERTY keyboard to Colemak, and I wanted to share my experience so far.

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Dan Kelch

Author: Dan Kelch