Tools for Tedious Tasks in Visual Studio Code

Every so often, there are projects and tasks that you dread — not because of their complexity, but because of their tediousness. An hour spent typing out sequences of data goes by much slower than an hour spent solving a difficult problem. Fortunately, there are tools that can help reduce or avoid the repetition of […]

3 Easy Ways to Explain Your Code to Future Developers

At Atomic Object, we work in a lot of existing codebases, editing code written by previous consultants, employees of the client organization, and sometimes even other Atomic developers. The older the codebase, the more inconsistency you’ll find in pattern, style, and organization. This, of course, makes jumping in to do additional work more difficult. I […]

My Top Five Emoji for Doing Business

At my workplace, we use Slack (an instant messaging platform) to communicate. That really means we use emoji to communicate. Email is still kept more formal, but instant messages are for communicating casual, quick thoughts without much effort. Emoji can be more expressive than typical short responses like, “Okay,” “Thanks,” or “I’m in.” And as […]

Making an Angular Directive to Toggle Password Visibility

Often when implementing a password field on a form, you’ll want to add a button to toggle the masking/visibility of that password so the user can see what they’ve typed. In Angular, this can be easily achieved on any input field, thanks to directives. Today we’ll write an attribute directive, which can “change the appearance […]

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 […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Patrick Pale

Author: Patrick Pale