In this week’s post, we’re going to dive deeper into ATOMs: the core foundation of Hetchr we revealed last week. ATOMs, short for Aggregated Tech Operations Modules, are bi-directional micro-applications that allow developers to interact with key features from their software engineering tools. These modules provide real-time updates from your suite of tools (GitHub, Gitlab, Jira, CircleCI, etc.) as well as the ability to make edits directly. Effectively, we are building a one-stop-shop for software engineers.
Global Overview of ATOMs
Why is it important to centralize your workspace?
When teams of developers have data across a variety of silos (in our case, tools), it makes communication difficult even for simple questions. It is much easier to make informed decisions when all of your data is displayed, managed, and edited in one centralized location. This helps optimize communication between team members and leads to cost-efficient decision-making for managers. By centralizing only important information, you and your team will be more aligned on the tasks at hand and you will be more consistent with deliveries and deadlines.
ATOMs enable you to:
- view a live feed of your team’s progress across your suite of software engineering tools
- make edits directly to these tools
- customize a dashboard with only information relevant to you
Let’s dive into how we have designed our platform. Below, we present a series of screens showing the progression of adding ATOMs to your dashboard.
Here’s our dashboard in its bare form (no ATOMs). For example, imagine you work for one company and are a part of two teams or projects. The two circles in the top left are your Workspaces, representing the teams or projects of developers you are a part of. You can create as many dashboards as you’d like and switch between teams or projects whenever you’d like.
On the top right, we have a toggle switch that allows you to switch between Team view and Personal view. In Team view, ATOMs will display a global overview of all of the members of the workspace. In Personal view, ATOMs will show only data, tickets, comments, and tags that are relevant to you. Just by flipping a switch, you can toggle between your own data and that of your colleagues. And finally, in the bottom right we have the “Add ATOM” button, which is how you’ll begin creating your dashboard.
What exactly are ATOMs?
In short, ATOMs are key functions of your software engineering tools. For example, we are developing an ATOM for GitHub pull requests where you can view/edit recent pull requests and their tags, dates, authors, reviewers, comments, and points.
Each ATOM is designed to be flexible and fit into any developer’s workflow. As you stack more and more ATOMs into your workspace, you no longer need to switch between tools- it’s all right in one place.
Stacking ATOMs in your workspaces
Through our interviews with developers, we compiled a list and decided to build an initial set of ATOMs that are essential to most teams. As we further build out our platform, we plan to add a catalog of ATOMs by working closely with you. Yes you, reading this! As new tools come to market, we will take suggestions from the community on which ATOMs to build (you can contact us directly here or join our Slack community here). After all, the goal is to streamline your work and make everything easier for you and your team.
Streamline onboarding
One topic we’ve recently explored is onboarding new team members. The process can be slow at times: getting tools set up (Note from Will: need more info on this process) and getting new team members up to speed with the scope. When onboarding a new employee or a freelancer, our platform can help new developers get up to speed in a very short amount of time. All of the key features, tools, and processes they need are in one place, ready to go.
Tool bi-directionality
The most important aspect of our ATOMs is the ability to edit your tools directly through Hetchr. It’s not just a display of information, like a web aggregator. By cutting out unwanted features, we’ve re-defined the UX of each tool (ex: GitHub PR) to focus on only the most important and frequently used elements. Clicking on an ATOM opens up a panel on the right, allowing you to make these adjustments that are also reflected in the source tool. Ultimately, cutting out the least used features of your tools will streamline your work so you can get back to what matters most: coding.
If you’d like to stay up to date with Hetchr, feel free to follow us on social media as we update our journey. We’re looking forward to the next months!
Our website is now live and you can sign up for early access here.
Sincerely,
The Hetchr Team
