Commit Your “One-Time-Use” Scripts to Version Control

You’ve probably written a script that was intended to be used only once. But what do you after it has served its purpose? It’s easy to throw it in the digital trash bin when you’re done, but I believe these “throwaway” files should be tracked in version control.

Keep the Flow Going: Four Tips for Distraction-Free Programming

At Atomic, many people have read and enjoyed Cal Newport’s book Deep Work. This book is all about the importance and the art of achieving great things by eliminating distractions and maximizing flow.

Four Tips for Dealing with Poorly Documented Libraries

Every developer has had to deal with the struggle of sifting through documentation that is incomplete, incoherent, outdated, or simply non-existent. Whether it’s libraries, frameworks, or platforms, the presence of good documentation can mean the difference between success and failure. The absence of good documentation is a serious enough downside to justify avoiding a certain […]

Five Ways to Engage in Productive Code Reviews

Code reviews are a common practice at many software companies. Being a good recipient of a code review is just as important as producing quality reviews for others. The key to handling both of these situations well is to approach them as learning opportunities. A good code review should maintain code health, encourage healthy team […]

Straight to the Source (Code): Getting up to Speed on New Libraries

I started my career at Atomic Object about four months ago. During that time, I’ve needed to get up to speed on a tech stack where I only had bits and pieces of experience. I had to learn to navigate a far bigger project than anything I had worked on during my time in college. […]

Four Techniques for Making Sense of Legacy Code

At some point or another, many developers will need to confront legacy code. The difficulty of this task can vary drastically, depending on several factors. If the codebase is relatively small and developers who have actively worked on it are available, it might not be that painful to figure out what is going on. However, […]

Three Ways to Use Emoji for Faster Debugging

Debugging is one of the most frustrating and painful things a developer will go through. Maybe the debugger isn’t working correctly, or the stack trace is uninformative, or maybe the code base is large and unfamiliar. Regardless of the specific problem, the goal is always the same: figure out the source of the problem and […]

Lessons Learned from Deploying Outside my Comfort Zone

If your team hasn’t yet reached the utopia of a fully automated deployment pipeline, you likely have a series of steps or scripts that you perform for every deployment. Perhaps this process is documented somewhere, or maybe (more likely) it’s just passed down from developer to developer through tribal knowledge.

Keep Your Product Owner in the Loop with Intermediate Deliverables

It’s ideal to write stories that can deliver a feature, end-to-end, all at once. But sometimes–especially when integrating with new systems, dealing with complex data processing, or working with a complex story dependency graph—it makes more sense to break up the work so you can deliver each story as its own link in a long […]

The Hazards of Transactional Test Isolation

These days, it’s standard practice to run your unit and system tests with some degree of parallelism. When doing so, it’s important to ensure that the code being tested doesn’t interfere with other running tests. Usually, this comes down to the database layer. There are a few options for accomplishing isolation at the database layer. […]

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