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 […]

Three Habits to Break on Large React Native Projects

Working on a large(ish) React Native project presents some unique challenges for web and mobile developers. Isolating components from one another is a great way to make refactoring easy, but it leads to some pretty gnarly directory hierarchies. If you read much React Native code, you’re bound to pick up a few habits that cause […]

Three Command Line Utilities to Reduce Everyday Frustrations

Every once in a while, I pick up a new tool that makes my work days nicer. Here are three that I’ve started using regularly on a recent project. Maybe they’ll make your work days nicer, too.

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Joe Chrysler

Author: Joe Chrysler