Create & Auto-deploy a Website with Create React App, Github, and Netlify

Ever wanted to develop your own website, but didn’t know where to start? Here is a quick tutorial on how to get your own website set up (for free!) within a couple of minutes using Create React App. We’ll also use Github and Netlify’s auto-deployment feature. React Application Setup Our site will be a React […]

Speeding Up Remote Project Onboarding with VS Code Live Share

Joining on a new project while working remotely is difficult. Learning the tech stack, business logic, test process, and so on is much harder to do when you’re alone. Of course, when I say alone, I don’t mean completely alone. You have Zoom, Discord, Teams, and Slack. But you are still physically alone. Your coworkers […]

Screen – My Favorite Multi-Purpose Tool for Pair Programming

As remote work extends into the foreseeable future, we’re all searching for ways to make long-distance pair programming work better — especially when joining a project (or, in my case, just starting out as a developer). If I were living through an alternate 2020 in which I was sitting physically next to my pair, I […]

Integrating ESLint into an Existing Codebase

Have you ever turned on ESLint and been faced with thousands of lines of red-highlighted code? I’ve been there. I was recently tasked with adding ESLint to a large codebase so we could enable linting in our CI pipeline. The developers who owned the project were not very familiar with Javascript or ESLint, and I […]

Better Remote Pairing with Keycastr and Presentify

We’ve all been doing a lot more remote pairing lately. Since March, our team has tried just about every remote collaboration tool available. For pair programming, we’ve relied on a blend of video conferencing, screen sharing, and VS Code LiveShare. LiveShare gives us Google Docs-like collaborative editing, while a shared screen lets both people see […]

Defined Docker Networks for Seamless Communication Between Projects

If you have a containerized application composed of multiple services, it can become a burden to string together in-network communication. Fortunately, Docker Compose solves this networking problem by making it easy for your containers to communicate without knowing one another’s context. In a couple of short steps, I’ll show you how to quickly get a […]

Connecting the Intellij IDEA Debugger to a Maven Execution

Recently, I worked on a Maven project that relied on a proprietary pipeline framework to execute the code we were writing. Because of the obfuscation of this proprietary code, my teammates and I wanted to be able to debug our own code from our IntelliJ IDE. However, we were not using the build functionality offered […]

Using Discord to Drop (& Erect) Communication Barriers When WFH

I recently asked Atomic’s #working-remote Slack channel if anyone had a good solution for a problem I keep running into while working from home: I feel it’s a testament to a healthy working culture that I received no fewer than three different responses trying to reassure me that it was okay to turn off my […]

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 […]

CircleCI vs. Azure Pipelines: A Comparative Analysis

I’ve recently had the unique opportunity to work with both CircleCI and Azure Pipelines at the same time on one project. In this post, I’ll compare and contrast my experiences using these two tools. If you’re trying to decide between the two, I hope you can benefit from my experience. Context & Caveats You should […]

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