Author: Jeanette Head

A Strategy for Teaching Programming – Logic First

Programming is all about the creative logical thinking flow, and very little about the syntax. However, a lot of teaching materials take the reverse approach and teach the syntax of variables and if statements without giving them meaning. In my experiences with teaching robotics students and adults learning programming, it’s much better to start with […]

A Day in the Life of an Atom – Development

Working for Atomic Object, a day at the office can including many things, such as meetings, project kickoff, sales meetings with clients, or project leadership. It’s pretty fast paced sometimes. I don’t know if there’s anything as a “typical day,” but I’m going to walk you through a development-heavy day on my current project, where I’m […]

Marionette.js Behaviors, Part 2: Testing Behaviors

This post is a follow-up to Al’s high-level introduction to Marionette Behaviors, published yesterday. As Al said, Marionette.Behaviors are an abstraction for sharing UI code between different views. They are a recent addition to the Marionette toolbelt (added in version 1.7). Prior to the introduction of behaviors, code sharing between views in Marionette had to be handled […]

5 Awesome Lesser-Known Chrome DevTools Features

Your development tools are important: good tools allow you to write and debug code effectively and quickly. For web development, I am constantly finding new things to love about the Chrome DevTools, which is available in every Google Chrome browser. It supports inline HTML and CSS editing, JavaScript breakpoints, viewing network calls, and many other things. […]

What Rambling in Meetings Says about Your Team

A group of uniquely skilled individuals working towards a single goal forms a team. On a good team, every player is contributing and looking out for their fellow teammates. On development teams, I’ve found that paying attention to the things that cause rambling in meetings — that is speak about a topic for an extended […]

Cool and Easy HTML with Emmet

Amaze your friends and write HTML faster with this one cool trick! But seriously, native HTML is repetitive and annoying to write. Emmet provides an intuitive and sleek alternative. It’s widely supported, and its simplest features can be adopted no problem on day one of using it. Plus — it feels great to use, and […]

How to Avoid Stupid Programming Mistakes

I made a mistake. While implementing a feature, I got stuck and spent a little bit too long spinning in circles before I figured out my problem. While I was scrutinizing the front end, the mistake was (of course) hidden in the furthest possible back-end location. When I finally discovered the error, I felt silly and […]