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.

Interactively Pipe Commands Together with the Ultimate Plumber

Recently, I discovered a new tool that quickly became an integral part of my daily development workflow. It’s called up – the Ultimate Plumber. It allows for interactive chaining of pipe outputs. This is a good choice for anyone who frequently pipes the output of awk, sed, grep, and other command line utilities together.

Level up your PostgreSQL Skill with Lateral Joins

PostgreSQL’s lateral joins have a lot of uses. One of my favorites is the ability to reuse calculations in a query. Before I discovered lateral joins, I would either copy calculations throughout the query or use subqueries. Neither of these approaches is ideal because they make the query much more difficult to read—and nearly impossible […]

Six Command Line Tools I Use Every Day

Knowing how to use the command line–and how to use it well–is often a necessary skill. I love working on the command line, and I love discovering new tools that I can use. Here are a few that I use every day, all of which have greatly boosted my productivity.

Eliminate Circular Dependencies from Your JavaScript Project

Circular dependencies (also known as cyclic dependencies) occur when two or more modules reference each other. This could be a direct reference (A -> B -> A): // file a.ts import { b } from 'b'; ... export a; // file b.ts import { a } from 'a'; ... export b; or indirect (A -> […]

Avoid Careless Production Mistakes with Custom Scripts

In the wise words of @stahnma, “Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.” Thankfully, the project I’m working on has multiple environments: production (the most recently-released version), staging (for pre-release testing), dev (for dev team use and testing), and multiple review apps […]

Incrementally Building My Own Code Health Tool

Recently, I’ve been looking for ways to improve the code health of a project I’m working on. It’s a pretty big team, so things are moving quickly. While the codebase is in good shape now, little things can quickly spiral out of control.

Building Your Own VS Code Extension for a Mac Touch Bar

Visual Studio Code is an excellent editor, with a ton of room for customization. As a recent convert from Emacs, I appreciate the ability to customize my editor through the form of extensions. Creating an extension is quite simple, if none that fit your needs are available in the marketplace.

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Dan Kelch

Author: Dan Kelch