Working Hard When It’s Hard to Work

Maybe it’s controversial to say, but work isn’t always the most interesting. Sometimes, you fall into a routine where you feel stuck. Other times, your project has slowed down, or the work has become too easy. Your client struggles to give you more work, or your team runs out of interesting problems to solve.

Three Strategies for Working Solo as a Junior Developer

Recently, I was in a position where I was the only developer assigned to my project. Not for too long, as it turned out, but initially, I didn’t know how long I’d have to fly solo. As a more junior-level developer, the thought of working alone for an indeterminate amount of time was terrifying. However, […]

Four Reasons to Attend a Specific Conference as a Generalist

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending the Chain React conference in Portland, Oregon, hosted by the nice folks over at Infinite Red. It’s a React Native-focused conference, hosting talks by those who work on the core team, members of the open-source community, and developers who use the framework in their everyday work. Here at […]

3 Ways to Learn More When You’re Already Learning Nonstop

I just finished my first year here at Atomic, which also happens to be my first year as a professional software consultant and developer. It was quite a year. I worked on five different projects during that time. The longest lasted seven months, and the shortest, only a week. I’ve gotten crash courses in not […]

Writing an iOS App on Your Phone with play.js

play.js is an interesting iOS app that acts as an IDE for Node.js and React Native. It’s a weird concept, but the thought of being able to create an app for my phone by using an app for my phone was too fun to pass up.

How I Got Involved with Volunteering to Help Kids Learn to Code

Recently at work, I’ve been reminded how lucky I was to get interested in computer science while I was in high school. My school offered both regular and AP computer science, and I was allowed to do an independent study one semester. These were pretty great opportunities that allowed me to foster and then pursue […]

Three React Native Libraries I Can’t Live Without

As I wrap up my current project, a React Native app, my team has been thinking a lot about what went right and what went wrong when using the framework. Since it’s a pretty lightweight framework, we brought in a lot of external libraries to help us build our app. Besides some always-useful libraries, such […]

Creativity Within Constraints: Having Fun with PICO-8

I’ve been learning about and playing with PICO-8, a “fantasy console” (as their website phrases it). It’s a virtual machine with specs designed to be extremely limited compared to modern computers. With a 128×128 display, 16 colors, and a program size confined to 32K, you’re dealing with what would now be considered pretty dated specs. […]

Four Ways to Contribute as a Junior Developer

As a junior developer here at Atomic, I’ve learned a lot in my first few months of work. It’s certainly not easy to begin a career as a professional developer. Surrounded by smart and experienced developers, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by a feeling that you need to contribute to your team and project at […]

An Intro to React Navigation for React Native

When you first sit down to write a React Native app, you’ll find that after making your first screen, you don’t have an easy way to navigate to another. React Native doesn’t have that functionality built in, but in this post, I’ll outline how to use a library that makes it possible: React Navigation.

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Patrick Pale

Author: Patrick Pale