William Shawn on Atomic Spin

Seven Practices for Growing Your Code Review Skills

Gone are the days of cowboy coders working alone with no collaboration or oversight. We've realized the value of building things with others who can point out hazards in our blind

Growing as Makers

Three Habits That Will Slowly Make You a Better Developer

Experience is a great teacher—but only if we remember what we learn. These day-to-day habits will keep you learning and growing in little ways that really add up.

Developer Tools

Modifying Your Git History? Here Are a Few Things to Think About

Avoiding lost code is one of the major benefits of version control, so using Git features that might cause data loss should only be done with careful consideration.

Development Practices

Four Keys to Effective Pair Programming

I've learned that there are a few things we can all do to become better pairs when we're asked to work on a pair programming team.

Extracurricular Activities

How to Get the Most Out of Your Side Projects without Going Crazy

Lots of developers have side projects they never finish. Is the answer time mgmt? Accountability? Goal setting? That starts to sound an awful lot like work.

Ruby

Make Monkey Patching in Ruby Less Risky with Refinements

Extending Ruby's built-in classes is convenient but dangerous. Use refinements to get fine grained control over your monkey patches.

Functional Programming

An Introduction to Property-Based Testing with JavaScript

How to apply the powerful Property-Based Testing technique to functional-style codebases in Javascript with the JSVerify library.

Functional Programming

A Simpler Case for Functional Programming & “Elegant” Code

Calling code "elegant" can be a difficult idea to wrap your head around, especially for novices. So here are a few examples of "elegant" functional code.

Development Practices

How to Read Code (Eight Things to Remember)

When diving into a mature codebase for the first time, you might feel like an archaeologist. That's great—you've got a bunch of shovels at your disposal.

Functional Programming

Using Decorators to Declaratively Extend Functions

What's really going on behind the scenes is composition, which means decorators are also great for cleaning up some functional programming boilerplate.

Web Apps

Lazy Sequences with ECMAScript 6 Generators

Some of the ways you can implement ECMAScript 6 lazy sequences using generators.

William Shawn

Keep up with our latest posts.