Atomic Spin

Personal Optimization • Jan 04, 2013

Protecting Your Apple Power Adapter with sugru

Afraid of snapping the wire going into your apple power adapter? Check out this simple and quick hack for reinforcing the strain relief.

DevOps & System Admin. • Jan 03, 2013

BERKS! – Simplifying Chef Solo Cookbook Management with Berkshelf

Berks is a new tool we've started using to keep repositories simple, even as the requirements grow.

Development Practices • Jan 01, 2013

Tricky Code: Taking Steps to Reduce Brittleness

Avoid "tricky code" whenever possible. If you must, test against changes.

News & Events • Dec 31, 2012

2012 Fun Facts

It was another enjoyable and productive year at Atomic Object. I thought it would be fun to reflect on 2012 and compile a few fun facts to share.

Ruby • Dec 30, 2012

Easier Debugging with capybara-screenshot

How I've used capybara-screenshot to work through some perplexing test failures.

Extracurricular Activities • Dec 29, 2012

Game Programming in Boo with the Unity Engine, Part 1: Not All Who Wander Are Lost

A review of my attempts to begin developing a game with Boo, especially my attempts to create a test-friendly coding environment.

Web Apps • Dec 28, 2012

Using Marionette.js with Backbone

Marionette has saved me a bunch of time I would've spent writing boilerplate to manage my views and compose nested structures.

jRuby • Dec 27, 2012

JrSerialPort: Connect to a Serial Port in JRuby via RXTX

Simple but effective JRuby code that simplifies the use of RXTX for basic serial port communications, with sample terminal.

Personal Optimization • Dec 26, 2012

Inspiration from Sherlock Holmes

Meditation, even for short periods of time, can increase our powers of concentration and effectiveness as we push the daily limits of multi-tasking.

Growing as Makers • Dec 23, 2012

Code Reading

Practice reading code leads to faster ramp-up on projects. Studying good codebases is also one of the best ways to pick up a sense for project architecture design.

Web Apps • Dec 21, 2012

Using Zeus to Pre-load Ruby on Rails Environments

If you're frustrated by startup delays in Ruby on Rails, try Zeus.

DevOps & System Admin. • Dec 18, 2012

Chef Solo with Capistrano

Capistrano can facilitate the use of Chef Solo for configuring and managing servers. This allows us to provision and manage servers in different environments.