Papers and Presentations
Atoms often give talks at conferences, for user groups, and in university classrooms. Here's where we've been talking recently.
-
Michigan Celebration of Women in Computing: Panel Discussion Molly Alger Grand Valley State University, Eberhard Center, March 2019
Open Source Projects
Atoms use and write a lot of open-source software. It's flexible, customizable, and plays well with other software. And it lets us spend more time doing unique things for our clients, rather than recreating tools that others have already made. Being a part of the open source community also keeps us connected to other great developers all over the world.
Here are a few of our most popular open-source projects:
-
heatshrink
A data compression library for C embedded/hard real-time systems.
- PiecePipe Helps you break your code into small interesting pieces and provides the glue for pipelining them together to provide elegant, readable code.
-
Unity
A unit test framework for C. A lightweight xUnit-style framework that possesses special features for embedded development.
- Objection A lightweight dependency injection framework for Objective-C for MacOS X and iOS. For those of you that have used Guice objection will feel familiar. Objection was built to stay out of your way and alleviate the need to maintain a large XML container or manually construct objects.
Development Practices
Problems solved, lessons learned, and tools we created to help us along.
- Agile & Embedded (They said it couldn't be done)
- Presenter First (Writing testable, rich GUI apps)

Carl's Academic Past
Carl Erickson, our founder, was a professor at Grand Valley State University before founding Atomic. Here, from the dusty, academic archives, are a few of his writings.
C++ and Objective-C
Chapter 14 of the book Handbook of Software for Engineers and Scientists, published by CRC Press in 1996.
Lecture Notes on Object-Oriented Programming
This collection of notes on OOP was never meant to stand alone. It also represents a view of OO circa early to mid 1990s. Some people still find them useful, so here they are, caveat emptor.
Object-Oriented Testing (PDF)
Published in Communications of the ACM, September 1994 with my friend and colleague Paul Jorgensen. This paper develops a simple model to understand the challenge of testing object interactions. Dated, but cool.