During the definition and planning phase of our current project, my team generated a lot of written specs. Seventeen feature specs, plus a PRD, a data model, and a handful of supporting reference docs. All of them are in Markdown, all living in the repo. That’s great for handing context back to an A...

I would bring my cats everywhere with me if I could, including to work. Since that’s not really an option, I decided to make them part of my Codex setup instead. I used codex-pets.net to turn my two tabby cats into a custom Codex Pet. To upload a Codex Pet, you need two files: pet.json […] The post ...

Years ago, I started a Zettlekasten-style collection of notes using Emacs’ org-roam package. A Zettlekasten system is typically comprised of hundreds of linked notes covering all topics of interest to the maintainer (if you’re interested in learning more on such systems, I recommend the book How To ...

My partner is a full-time artist, and a lot of that work comes from art commissions. And it isn’t a small amount of commissions either. There are some points where he takes up to 90 commissions at once. And for a long time, the whole operation ran on sticky notes. To me, the process was […] The post...

Frontier AI models today are incredibly powerful. They excel not just at writing bits of code but also at assisting with planning and architecture. They are also increasingly expensive. Early on in the AI era, developers had the luxury of tossing around tokens willy-nilly, delegating any task imagin...

For most of my career, I had a decent sense for answering two questions: how much work is ready to go, and how long is it going to take? I could look at a healthy backlog with a couple of weeks of estimated stories, do some math, and give a pretty good guess of what […] The post Human Habits for Lea...

Rails gave web developers a durable caching model. Cache the outer fragment. Reuse the inner fragments that did not change. The Rails caching guide calls this Russian doll caching. You Can Use Russian Doll Caching at the Edge. The same idea now applies outside the template. The dolls can span the br...

More than once in my career, I became that architect: the one the support team calls when something breaks in production, when a change request related to a complex feature is raised, or when a new team member needs to understand why the system works the way it does. Requirements documents, use case...

I live in a small apartment in Chicago with no closets, which means storage is not something I can take for granted. It is an ongoing design challenge. So, I’ve had to get creative. Every square foot has to earn its keep, while still feeling aesthetically like “me.” I built an open-shelf “closet” in...

If you want to see where clinical AI actually breaks, skip the vendor deck. Watch season two, episode six, of The Pitt. Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) rolls out an AI tool that writes the charts. It cuts documentation time by eighty percent. More time at the bedside. More time at home. Who say...

The longstanding adage that communication is key will ring true perpetually, especially when executing software delivery. Proper communication has the power to set the foundation for a project to either consistently thrive or create continuous bottlenecks that adversely impact productivity. The reci...

To lay things out on the table, this isn’t an “AI Bad, Humans Good” blog post. No-code tools have made it easier for non-developers to prototype basic apps, and coding agents have made it quicker for developers to get the first pass of a feature written. Agentic development hasn’t made writing human...

Shadcn is a set of reusable UI component patterns for use with React applications. However, instead of importing the elements like a traditional component library (@somewhere/ui), you add a local copy of the component source files into your project. This allows you to customize, extend, and shape th...

With the recent changes in agentic delivery, costs of development are going down, and processes are changing. That means there’s more time to try different methods and figure things out. Software today can still be clunky and irritating, with systems that take a lot of manual effort to glue together...

Agentic Android development works best when agents can build, install, run, test, and validate features against real devices or emulators without relying on Android Studio as the manual control center. In this article, “skills” means reusable agent instructions for a specific task, and “workflows” m...

As a software developer at Atomic Object, one of the expectations (and perks) of the job is taking advantage of professional development opportunities outside of work. Recently, I attended Code Remix, a developer-centric conference in Miami as my annual professional development experience. Through t...

For the past four months, I have been volunteering with the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) initiative as a facilitator running creative writing workshops inside Ann Arbor prisons. Coincidentally, here at Atomic Object, I am currently working on a team creating digital systems for the Michigan C...

We’re in a time of accelerated innovation. Some say the AI bubble is going to pop, while some are betting everything on it being the future. As a participant in the development industry, sticking your head in the sand can be fatal. Yet, hopping on the hype train can seem intimidating or feel aimless...

AI coding tools are getting wildly useful. They can scaffold features, explain code, write tests, refactor awkward functions, and sometimes make you feel like you suddenly hired a few extra developers who never sleep. That is exciting, and it really can change how fast teams move. But there is a tra...

The recent Trivy GitHub Actions security incident got me thinking more seriously about the security model around CI systems. Most teams spend a lot of time thinking about dependency security, but I increasingly think GitHub Actions workflows deserve to be viewed through the exact same lens. In some ...

Update: This post was written prior to the GSD repository being abandoned by its maintainer. The future of GSD is uncertain, but the lessons from this can be applied to other spec-driven development frameworks. My Intro To GSD I first used the Get Shit Done spec-driven development system for Claude ...

As a Junior Developer who is just starting out, I never really got to witness the world of Software design without virtual backlog management. I often hear about the boards filled with sticky notes as the backlog stand-in, but I always just assumed that since we don’t do it anymore, it must be ineff...

A few weeks ago, I asked my younger brother a very random question: “What would the consequences be of putting higher performance shock absorbers in my car?” Question One He led me down an interesting conversation about the costs, the considerations, the damage it could do to my very simple Mazda CX...

Not all questions are created equal. Recently, some discourse has been happening in my early career program around finding our voice, participating in meetings, and asking questions. This tends to be harder for early-career people for a multitude of reasons. I think a common denominator for a lot of...

Every year, the Merge conference in Grand Rapids brings together software developers, designers, product leaders, and technology professionals from across West Michigan to discuss how our industry is changing. Organized by Software GR, the conference has become a space for practical conversations ab...

Below, you’ll find a tour of CQRS, Event Sourcing, and Projections as they actually appear in a real production NestJS + KurrentDB + PostgreSQL + Drizzle codebase. It’s roughly a 15-minute read. The goal is not just to discuss what these patterns are, but why they are shaped the way they are, and wh...

Smart home devices are usually sold on convenience. Control the lights from your phone. Turn down the thermostat from bed. Get a camera notification when someone walks up to the porch. Automate the boring stuff and feel like you are living slightly closer to the future. That future gets a lot less f...

Have you ever wondered if there was an easier way to sort imports automatically in your Angular project? Disorganized imports make code harder to read, slow down code reviews, and cause unnecessary merge conflicts. Sorting them manually requires a lot of effort — what if you could automate it? Intro...

A few months ago I watched a sprint board do something I’d never quite seen before. Story cards weren’t stacking up in In Progress. They were stacking up in Ready for Review. On every project I’d ever worked on, the bottleneck was writing the code. Suddenly, on this project, it wasn’t. So how’d we g...

We are producing more with AI. What we’re producing less of, apparently, is honest reflection on what that actually means. The internet is full of frameworks, prompt guides, and tutorials promising you’ll “10x your productivity overnight.” The question nobody seems to want to answer is whether any o...