Ask these Questions when Applying Machine Learning to People

The field of machine learning matured with applications like spam filtering, targeted advertising, self-driving cars, and weather predictions. As machine learning techniques are increasingly used to make predictions about people, there are a few machine learning ethics questions we need to be asking ourselves.

Screen Sharing is Worth a Thousand Words

Recently, I’d been working on a file-importing feature for a client. They had described to me how they expected to receive their data, clean it, and import it—just like they did with an existing tool.

Customizing UIWebView for PDFs in Swift

UIWebViews are a handy way to show web content in an iOS app. They are especially useful for showing PDFs that are stored remotely. Apple largely treats UIWebViews like a black box: Documentation warns that they should not be subclassed. So what if you want to customize how they show PDFs? Recently, I went after […]

Rejuvenating My Developer Identity at AndConf

One of Atomic Object’s great benefits for employees is support for professional development, including sponsorship to attend tech conferences. This August, I went to AndConf.

Time Zones Aren’t Offsets – Offsets Aren’t Time Zones

It has been said many times, many ways: Offsets are not time zones, and time zones are not offsets! Some blog posts argue for one over the other. Here, I want to make the difference crystal-clear, so each of us can make our own decisions about when to use which (or both).

A Minimalist Guide to Customizing ActiveAdmin Forms

ActiveAdmin has saved a huge amount of time on our current project, and I highly recommend it for quickly giving non-technical people administrator access to your Rails app. Some of the documentation is great, and there are lots of methods you can use to customize, but there are also some out-of-date red herrings, some things that […]

CoreLocation in the Wild: Experiments in Monitoring More than 20 iBeacon Regions

On a recent project, we were using iBeacons and Core Location monitoring and ranging to track a user’s location in an indoor space. iBeacons are placed around the space and each iBeacon maps to a real world room or area like “conference room” and “entry area.” We had a simplifying assumption that beacons, Core Location […]

Volunteering at Hour of Code

On December 10th, 2015, Jeanette and I joined Estabrook Elementary School’s Hour of Code event as coaches. Our job was to encourage and guide students through what was, for many of them, their first formal introduction to computer science. For us, it was an introduction to people who, in 20 years’ time, might work with us. […]

How to Showcase Your Development Skills as a Busy Student

When you’re putting together a software developer resume or emailing a prospective company, including links to projects you’ve (co-) created can vastly improve your chances of convincing people to hire you. But how do you build a portfolio of projects when you’re a student who also works, takes care of family members, or has other responsibilities […]

Creating Vertical Alignment with Susy and CSS Flexbox

In the middle of a responsive page using Susy, I encountered a layout which required vertical alignment across different kinds of elements, ideally without hard-coding a dimension anywhere. I wondered, could Susy and Flexbox play nicely together to create this complex layout? Indeed, they could and they did!

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Devney Hamilton

Author: Devney Hamilton