You Need More than REST for API Success

On the surface, REST API design looks to be quite simple. You just need to follow some conventions for your URL paths and return an appropriate HTTP status code. But the reality of the networked world and the needs of your API consumers often go beyond what standing up a REST API can offer you. […]

Your Mocks Should Be Blowing Up

It happened again the other day: A team member was using a mocking library for unit testing and setting up the mocked members they knew they needed. The test didn’t fail, exactly, but it was behaving in a very strange way. When they asked me for help, I had a feeling about what might be […]

Keep Your Product Owner in the Loop with Intermediate Deliverables

It’s ideal to write stories that can deliver a feature, end-to-end, all at once. But sometimes–especially when integrating with new systems, dealing with complex data processing, or working with a complex story dependency graph—it makes more sense to break up the work so you can deliver each story as its own link in a long […]

Three Ways to “Own It” on a Large, Distributed Team

When I came to Atomic nearly five years ago, I joined the largest development team I had ever known. We had four developers from Atomic and two from the client working directly with us, as well as the client’s QA staff, an operations engineer assigned to our team, and the client’s software architect checking in.

Making Development with PowerShell More Hospitable

As generalists, we can and do work across many platforms and frameworks. But that doesn’t mean that we’re immediately comfortable when we have to pack up and move from the platform we typically call home, where we’ve got things arranged just the way we like it. When moving from a Unix-like platform to Windows, things […]

Getting More Space in Your VMware Fusion Windows Virtual Machine

If you’ve used VMware Fusion to run Windows on your Mac for any length of time, this is probably a familiar sight: Fusion only gives your Windows virtual machine 60 gigabytes of space, which may seem like plenty at first—but it rapidly fills up. Thankfully, there’s a relatively easy way to expand your space, as […]

My Long, Winding Journey to “Software Developer”

If you take a look at our team page today, you’ll see a little chart showing that almost all of our makers have a college degree, save one very small slice. That slice is me.

Spawn Virtual Browsers Effortlessly with Firefox Containers

You may have heard of Mozilla’s Facebook Container, an add-on for Firefox that keeps Facebook isolated whenever you open it. It’s an easy-to-use and simple tool for defending user privacy. But you may not have heard much about the Firefox features that make the Facebook Container possible. They’re called Firefox Containers—and they represent a useful […]

A JavaScript Object that Dynamically Returns Unknown Properties

In our current project, we make extensive use of JavaScript objects as dictionaries, with the property name functioning as a key for the object we want to look up. We can use the in operator to test for property presence, and the dictionaries are perfectly JSON-serializable. However, when it comes time to build test fixtures […]

Setting Up Windows to Build and Run Node.js Applications

Node.js is just JavaScript, right? So it should be really easy to run Node.js applications on Windows—just download and install Node, npm install, and go, right? Well, for some applications, that’s true. But if you need to compile extensions, you’ll need a few more things. And, of course, with Node.js itself being constantly under development, […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Mattie Behrens

Author: Mattie Behrens