I recently had the good fortune of speaking at CascadiaJS (shoutout to Carter Rabasa and the whole CJS team for putting on a truly wonderful event). I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on the content, it’s reception, and where I think we go from here. I’ll note here that I’m specifically foc...

I’ve made a lot of slide decks for design work presentations over the years. It started with PowerPoint, where one minor movement of an image or paragraph could mysteriously break the entire page. I then moved to Google Slides, Miro, and Figma Slides, with each feeling slightly better than the last,...

‘For most of my eight-year career, my development environment was never really designed. It accumulated. Every new project, language, and workflow added another alias, plugin, editor setting, or command-line utility. Some of those additions became indispensable. Others solved a problem I had once an...

On my latest project, I was tasked with rebuilding a mobile app’s order customization workflow. This included work such as modifying the product itself and persisting that state live as well as in the cart when it was finally ready to be ordered. The work was planned as one feature branch that could...

I was at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and one phrase was everywhere: loops. The line everyone riffed on came from Claude Code creator Boris Cherny in an earlier talk: “I don’t write prompts for Claude anymore. … My job now is writing loops.” As an engineer, I was bo...

Anyone working on software can speak to the importance of documentation. They will tell you how helpful well-written documentation is, and how they would be lost without it. However, when it comes time to write said documentation, it becomes a chore. And by the time it is finally done, it always see...

Every city with innovation ambitions has the same ingredients list: capital, talent, universities, corporates, founders, and a calendar full of convenings. What separates the ecosystems that compound from the ones that stall isn’t the ingredients. It’s orchestration, the connective tissue that moves...

Every team optimizes for something, whether or not anyone says so out loud. Some optimize for reliability, some for speed to market, some for polish. Building fast and shallow is one of those choices, and on the right project, it’s a legitimate one. On my current project, that’s exactly the choice t...

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the pace of our work. If you’re like me, you’ve probably noticed that using LLMs and AI agents can accelerate our output exponentially. It’s a rush. We can spin up environments, stub out boilerplate, and debug in seconds. We are moving projects forward, shipp...

A political campaign runs on volunteers, and almost none of those volunteers are programmers. For more than the past six months, I’ve been volunteering for a U.S. Senate campaign, building tools that help the campaign and other volunteers organize people and visualize data. What started as a small b...

Agent loops are in fashion these days, so I thought I’d talk about one of my favorite ones. Strangely, designing a useful agent loop turns out to be eerily similar to designing feedback loops in “pre-AI” software engineering. Or any sort of engineering, come to think of it. But let’s not overthink t...

I’ve been preparing a talk on getting real, reliable work out of AI, and I went down a deep research rabbit hole along the way. I read peer-reviewed studies, engineering write-ups from companies building these tools, and a surprising number of accounts from ordinary operators — a window importer, a ...

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...