Tighten the Feedback Loop with Published Storybooks

On a recent React web project, we updated our continuous integration server to automatically publish Storybooks. It’s been an exciting change. If you aren’t familiar with Storybook, you can check out any of these other Spin posts for an intro. Short version: It’s a tool that lets your development team build pieces of a web […]

Improve Your Cloud Infrastructure with entr, Terraform, and tflint

Working with a cloud of microservices is a fact of life for web and mobile developers. Though some of us are lucky enough to have a team of ops engineers who keep the back end humming, many of us have to do the hard work of envisioning, implementing, and deploying that cloud ourselves. Tools like […]

It’s Okay to Use Public WiFi; You Don’t Need a VPN

Personal VPN services have been advertising aggressively. Listen to just about any podcast or radio show for a while, and you’ll hear a message like: “If you leave your internet connection unencrypted, your passwords and credit card numbers could be vulnerable to bad people or Batman…” (I kid you not). ☝️ That’s good ad copy, […]

How to Make Remote Meetings More Pleasant with Zoom

Let’s be real for a minute. Remote meetings usually suck. Even when everyone has the best intentions, laggy video and the inability to use shared tools like whiteboards can hamstring what should be a productive gathering of highly engaged teammates. At Atomic, we work with a lot of people from all over the country, so […]

How We Built a Scrappy Curriculum Editor using VSCode, TypeScript, and AWS Lambda

Great apps aren’t stuck in the mud. They change with the times. They float like oak leaves along a wide river of user expectations, business requirements, fashion trends, and platform changes. To keep floating, leaves 🍂 apps need a watchful team of developers to walk the muddy banks nudging them back toward fast water whenever […]

Project-Specific Command Line Shortcuts with direnv

Most projects that last more than a few weeks accumulate some form or another of automation. Some carefully craft jobs in a package.json file and run them with yarn automation. Some stuff their Makefiles full of .PHONY targets and run them with make my-automation-better. Still others fill up a directory with Bash scripts and run […]

What to Try When You’ve Tried Everything Else

Developing custom software is tough. There are numerous unknowns and tradeoffs at every stage of a project—each with unique short-, medium-, and long-term consequences in several dimensions. As a consultant, my job is to help people navigate those complex tradeoffs, and to build an app that will help my clients do what they do better, […]

My Git Branching Strategy – Graph Gardening

If you've ever worked on a team with more than a couple of people, you've probably been involved in a discussion about branching strategies. Git-flow, GitHub-flow, Microsoft-flow, and many others all try to minimize disruption and conflict when making changes to a large codebase. Recently, I've been playing with a new strategy that may help […]

Simulate Network Outages in Your App with Little Snitch

Modern development tools are super-convenient. XCode’s more recent builds let you debug an iOS app over WiFi, so you don’t have to succumb to the indignity of plugging in a Lightning cable (so 2017). React Native’s tooling goes a step farther, giving you the ability to run the native part of the app on a […]

How Many Sprints Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb?

I haven’t touched a light switch in weeks. Over the past few months, I’ve been rolling out a smart light network throughout my house. To successfully complete the project, I followed a simple Agile process that we use all the time at Atomic to help clients navigate large software projects with lots of stakeholders. If […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Joe Chrysler

Author: Joe Chrysler