Recently, we welcomed a bright new member of Atomic’s Accelerator to our team. Coming straight from school, they’ve had limited exposure to development in the wild. As a result, there are tools I take for granted every day that they have never heard of. This includes tools that may seem obvious to e...

Google Sheets is one of those tools that feels forgiving, and it becomes miserably unhelpful when it breaks. You type something in, drag a formula down, and everything looks fine — until a formula starts pointing at the wrong cells, or a perfectly good ID number turns itself into a date. After years...

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the AI Engineer World’s Fair. I stepped off the subway and made my way up the stairs toward Moscone West, nervous and excited. Finally — a few days to devote my full attention to sorting the real innovation from the hype. And I came […] The post...

In late June, our office quietly crossed a threshold worth reflecting on. With two new accelerators joining the team, we now have 9 women and 7 men in our Raleigh office. For the first time, women make up the majority of the people at my workplace, something not many in the tech industry can say. […...

A couple of months ago, I wrote about my client team’s decision to make human code review optional: an approval from an AI tool became all that was needed to merge. At the time, I said it was too early to tell. Now, enough time has passed to share some honest reflections. The Norms Didn’t […] The po...

Agentic development is fast. An agent can scaffold a feature, write the tests it thinks it needs, and open a pull request before you’ve finished your morning coffee. That speed is real, and agentic development is not going away. Which means the QA analysts who thrive in this brave new world won’t be...

Agentic engineering is changing the shape of how software teams work, and in doing so, is raising the value of judgment work. Strong consulting on what’s actually worth building becomes an even larger differentiator. Framing ambiguous problems clearly, validating the assumptions that a plan rests on...

If you’ve been a developer for a while, you’re probably adopting AI one way or another. I still remember the early days when prompts never got me what I wanted. I figured it would be a while before AI took over my job. Within weeks, however, as the models improved and I got better at […] The post Gr...

Every software system fails. This is inevitable. But burying errors doesn’t make them go away. As developers, we want to believe that our systems work as intended. So it’s easy to gloss over error handling. Until something actually goes wrong, it’s easier to log something vague and return success an...

On a recent project, I watched a team spend the better part of a week tracking down a single regression. The pipeline was a long-running simulation suite. Each test run took hours. There were dozens of commits to check, and the only way to check them was manually: run the sim, wait, evaluate the res...

Whether you use or even like AI, the genie is out of the bottle. What used to feel like a more personalized Google search can now index your entire codebase, explain how unfamiliar areas are structured, warn you of system design implications, and build features of surprising complexity. (Assuming, o...

A product requirements document is a short, shared artifact that states the core problem a piece of work solves and what has to be true to call it done. It is not a full spec with every edge case and acceptance criterion. It sits higher than that: the problem, the goals, the boundaries of scope, […]...

I run a handful of Ubuntu virtual machines in Proxmox. They host applications via Docker Compose, VPN service, NUT services, and a few other odds and ends around my home lab. Virtual machines I’ve created within the last year and a half or so are entirely under the control of OpenTofu (for creating ...

A few years ago, I wrote about the difference between UI and UX design, using the example of Joanna, a busy mom, hiring a designer to help design storage containers to organize her kitchen. Ira, the UI Designer, designed beautiful, ergonomic containers that were more than she had hoped for, but they...

With the rollout of Atomic Object’s agentic delivery model, keeping my thoughts straight has been more challenging than before. Though agentic delivery noticeably speeds up the implementation process, it also increases context-switching for team leads and product folks. It feels more pressing to kee...

For a recent project, I needed a small, representative sample of a large table, and a few circumstances made that less straightforward than it sounds. Here’s the sampling approach I landed on. The job itself was simple enough: run some processing over a configurable slice of a very large table. Not ...

Look at how most software projects are laid out and you’ll spot the same quiet assumption baked into the timeline. There’s a block at the front for design. Discovery, research, some sprints of wireframes and mockups. Then a handoff. Then a long stretch labeled “build.” The design block has a clear e...

My husband runs a pop-up bakery called Molta, and he needed a website. Nothing fancy: who he is, what he bakes, where to find us, etc. For a site this small, the obvious move is to pay for a Squarespace site (or something similar), click a few templates together, and be done in an afternoon. […] The...

As our Raleigh office settled into its new space, we kept coming back to one question: what should we do with our entryway? There’s a big wall visible right from the elevators, which is the first thing people see when they step into Atomic Object Raleigh. We decided to bring in a local artist, Bella...

For most of software’s history, the limit on what you could ship was your hands: how fast you could type, how much you could get built before the day ran out. Agents lifted that limit. A developer can now run several streams of work at once and get through more in an afternoon than used […] The post...

Coding agents are getting pretty good at building screens from a screenshot, Figma link, or a loose description of what you want. But “pretty good” can still mean a lot of small cleanup work: the button is almost right, the spacing is close, the font weight is questionable, and the loading state som...

As an American adopted from China, I have always wanted to learn Mandarin to connect more with my culture. After enrolling in a local beginner Mandarin course, I decided I wanted to use flashcards to supplement my learning. I tested out a few flashcard apps, but wasn’t fully satisfied with any of th...

I went into a recent project excited. The newer LLM tools had crossed a threshold for me. They felt like something I could finally lean on hard for a tricky visual-design problem: cross-domain research, concept generation, and prototyping all running in one loop. I was genuinely confident going in. ...

It’s three in the afternoon, and Claude Code asks me, for the 40th time today, whether it can run a command. I glance at it, hit Allow, and keep moving. I didn’t really read it. The thirty-ninth time, I didn’t read that one either. That reflex is the problem. Every permission prompt is supposed to [...

I am no stranger to working up and down the stack. To me, it’s part of the challenge, and I love a complex chunk of work. I will choose stories in the backlog requiring parallel frontend and backend changes just for fun. Lately, I have come to appreciate how simple tools like Swagger make it […] The...

In the past few years, AI has woven itself into nearly every corner of how we work, communicate, and make decisions. Hiring algorithms screen (and discard) resumes before a human ever reads them. Automated systems flag fraud, recommend medical treatments, and help determine prison sentences. The ass...

I sat across from Michael Levy at a room full of healthcare and technology leaders recently. We were talking about why digital transformation projects fail at such a startling rate, 95% of them, by some estimates. His answer surprised the room. It wasn’t the technology, the budget, or the vendor. It...

My current software project had an issue, and, over time, it has become more of an issue as coding agents have gotten better. That problem is running parallel agents in our codebase while providing them strong methods to validate their work. The codebase was started in 2021. That’s before agentic co...

Perhaps due to working with AI coding agents inside of a VM, I’ve found myself spending more time in terminal applications lately. Terminal Applications In addition to the agent harness applications, I’ve also been using several other TUI (Terminal User Interface) applications heavily. lazygit – a t...

I recently started creating a real-time ship combat game where multiple players compete to be the last one standing. The game needs to be playable over LAN, and I would like to create SDKs for developers to write bots to play in addition to human players playing themselves. To achieve this, I first ...