Atomic Spin

News & Events • Mar 30, 2014

Saying Goodbye to Maja

We lost a member of the Atomic family recently. Maja, my 11-year-old Siberian Husky, reached the end of her long, happy dog life.

Developer Tools • Mar 29, 2014

Increasing Pivotal Tracker Usability with Shorter IDs

Shorter IDs makes it easier to find stories your Pivotal Tracker backlog, so I used Pivotal's REST API to create custom IDs.

DevOps & System Admin. • Mar 28, 2014

Simpler Deploys with git Subtrees

Using subtrees can help work around specific limitations in Heroku and enforce proper separation of concerns.

Business Practices • Mar 27, 2014

Wanted: New Atoms

At Atomic, we measure technical ability not on what we need right now, but on the candidates' understanding of the tools they claim to know.

Project & Team Management • Mar 26, 2014

A Checklist for Great Feature Requirements

4 guidelines for writing story requirements that won't make your engineers want to pull their hair out.

Embedded Systems • Mar 25, 2014

2 Ways to Use Single-Member structs in C

Use C structs to preserve array size information and make built-in types stronger.

UX/Design Practices • Mar 24, 2014

4 Reasons Designers Should Be Coding

Many tools make it easy for designers to get by without coding, but you miss out on greater opportunities to connect with the medium of your end product.

Developer Tools • Mar 23, 2014

Xcode Efficiency Tips: Keyboard Shortcuts

Xcode shortcuts for getting around workspace windows, navigating in the editor, building, running, testing, and debugging.

Growing as Makers • Mar 22, 2014

Continuous Improvement: Know Yourself, and Know Your Tools!

Toolsmithing and tool sharpening will help you get on the path to continuous improvement.

DevOps & System Admin. • Mar 21, 2014

Using a Smartcard with a VirtualBox-based Vagrant Virtual Machine

An easy way to connect my Smartcard reader with a VM running Ubuntu using Vagrant, VirtualBox, and the standard precise64 basebox.

Personal Optimization • Mar 20, 2014

4 Ways to Mitigate the Effects of Context Switching

Context switching is unavoidable, but you can learn to do it less often and train yourself to get back on track faster after each switch.

Embedded Systems • Mar 19, 2014

Getting Started with MQTT

The MQTT protocol has lower overhead, suits devices that are suspended most of the time, and has support for reliable delivery built into its protocol.