Atomic Spin

Functional Programming • Feb 12, 2012

Higher-order Contextual Functions in Clojure

Higher-order Clojure functions defining a context (like swap! and send-off) follow a common pattern. See how to apply the pattern to your own functions and macros and how it can be

Web Apps • Feb 08, 2012

CSS3 Transitions – Spicing Up DOM Changes

CSS3 transitions can be a nice addition to web applications when used properly. Here are a few tips on when and how to user them.

Development Practices • Feb 04, 2012

Balancing Safety and Convenience

Most languages will throw an exception if you do this, but not all. Not throwing an exception can let you write simpler code.

Developer Tools • Jan 28, 2012

Less Perplexing Terminal Multiplexing with tmux

As a professional problem solver, I spend a considerable portion of my day working at a command prompt within a terminal multiplexer called tmux.

Developer Tools • Jan 27, 2012

Safeguarding Your Productivity with Backups

Make a bootable backup of your hard drive so that you can quickly recover in the event of a hard drive failure and maintain your productivity.

UX/Design Practices • Jan 26, 2012

Understand Design or Fail

I often use “Big D Design” to distinguish Strategy and Process from the Tangible, where I often use “Visual Design” to describe the craft.

Development Practices • Jan 24, 2012

Designers Are More Valuable than Programmers

Insights as to how developers practice design and an assertion of the diminishing value of the "coder" mindset.

Developer Tools • Jan 22, 2012

Highlight Strings in Cucumber Features with Vim

An "after" syntax file that adds highlighting to double quoted strings in Cucumber feature files when using tpope's vim-cucumber plugin.

Web Apps • Jan 21, 2012

window.location as a Global Variable

Why I've chosen to avoid setting window.location directly, and how I've avoided it using Backbone's structures.

iOS / OS X • Jan 20, 2012

Mobile Safari on iOS 5.1 Unexpectedly Making Cross Origin Resource Sharing Requests

My Ajax calls were failing and I saw my application logs containing many requests with the HTTP verb "OPTIONS". I narrowed it to oddities with PDFs on Safari.

UX/Design Practices • Jan 19, 2012

Usability Testing Field Notes

Some thoughts about what it takes to put together a successful usability testing session.

Evolving the Industry • Jan 19, 2012

A Modern Web Development Syllabus

A list of resources, books, and tutorials to bring a computer scientist up to speed with the latest tools and practices used in modern web development.