Early Career Advice: Optimize for Continued Learning

Five years into your career, you’ve already learned a lot. You’ve learned more about how you work best, what you enjoy, where you’re strong, and where you could use some growth. You’ve learned how to do your job, and you’re getting good at it (if you do say so yourself). You’re also probably starting to […]

Six Questions to Ask Your Software Consultant Team

As consultants, we work hard to anticipate our clients’ questions and needs. But sometimes we need a little nudge to share more detail. To show how these “nudges” can enhance outcomes, I’ve put together six questions you can ask to get more out of your software consultant team.

5 Ways to Highlight the Value of Your Development Team

A lot of the awesome work developers do is not self-evident to project stakeholders. Customers, project managers, business analysts, and others may never see or hear about all of the big and little things you do behind the scenes that ultimately make their project a success.

Design Thinking and Atomic Project Leadership

IDEO sees design thinking as three lenses through which we can view design: desirability (human), viability (business), and feasibility (technical). Atomic’s project leadership roles (Design, Delivery, Development) share a significant alignment with these dimensions. That alignment strengthens our long-held belief that everyone on the team has a place in the design conversation.

How to Create an Effective Project Charter

Micah Alles and I recently attended a Certified Scrum Product Owner training course with Mike Cohn. In addition to the excellent Scrum-process-focused learning, this course was a reminder of how important it is to maintain a fresh, relevant project goal that aligns and motivates the team.

Introduce Human-Centered Design: Start Small and Start Today

Introducing Human-Centered Design doesn’t have to be complicated. It isn’t a monolithic process that has to be applied across an entire organization before it works. Human-Centered Design is a discipline, a way of thinking and framing context, that provides value incrementally throughout the lifecycle of product design, development, support, and beyond. You can start simple, […]

Four Lessons Learned while Troubleshooting CAN Bus Communication with my Subaru

I recently started a fun personal project involving two of my favorite things: cars and software. Modern cars come with plenty of software on board, controlling everything from engine behavior and stability to door locks and entertainment. The software already running on my Subaru does plenty of interesting things, but I’d really like to see […]

Six Ways to Tame Your IoT Project

IoT projects can be complicated. Compared to a mobile or web application, connected physical products frequently involve a wider breadth of software, hardware, and people. The complexity of building an IoT product can quickly become overwhelming if not properly managed. Here are a few things that can help tame the chaos of an IoT project.

More Robust Browser-Side Networking

What happens to your web application when used over a flaky network connection? Does it swallow errors and stop responding? Does it bounce users immediately to the browser’s built-in “no connection” page? Does it give you a way to continue using the application when network connectivity is restored? It used to be acceptable to simply […]

The Many Uses of Pairing: Replacing Post-Work Review with Collaboration

One big thing that Extreme Programming got right is pair programming. Rather than waiting until work is complete to review code with another developer, the authors of XP figured that if having two pairs of eyes on code was important, why not do it continuously?

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Jason Porritt

Author: Jason Porritt