What Does “Run the Tests” Mean? – How Shared Symbols Can Speed Up Team Communication & Reduce Errors

On your project, what does “run the tests” mean? What about “add a feature?” “Fix a bug?” When passed through the brain of someone on your team, these phrases bloom into specific things — a command that you run in the Terminal on a developer’s laptop, a process that you follow to add new functionality […]

Take Control of Your Multi-Browser Life with Choosy

Last time, I showed you how to use a proxy to send some (but not all) of your traffic over a VPN that lacks built-in traffic controls. I’ve been running that setup for a few months now, and it’s been especially powerful during this season of working from home. After writing that guide, I found […]

How to Keep Home Stuff off Your Work VPN while Social Distancing

All of us at Atomic have been working remotely for a couple of weeks now. In that time, we’ve learned a lot about what works really well (team Discord servers, Zoom happy hours, lots of affirmation) and what doesn’t work quite so well. One of the things that I’ve found troublesome is using whole-network VPNs. […]

Developer Task Automation – It’s Easier Than You Think

You have a lot of things to think about when building the next great app. Remembering the command line arguments for your build system shouldn’t be one of them. Large IDEs make this easy. You can stuff all of your build automation behind one big ▶️ play button. That’s great for traditional iOS or Android […]

Overcoming Pair-formance Anxiety

Pair programming is fantastic. And daunting. It’s one of the most effective ways to build high-quality code quickly and efficiently in a flexible way. But your first time pairing can be terrifying. If solo programming is like making your own lunch in the morning, switching to pair programming can feel like being asked to make […]

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 […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Joe Chrysler

Author: Joe Chrysler