How do you currently give feedback to new team members as they’re onboarding in their new role? How do you set clear expectations for them of what success looks like? When we onboarded two delivery leads to the Ann Arbor office last year, we experimented with a lightweight informal feedback framewor...

I’ve been talking to a lot of people lately who say some version of the same thing: “I know I should be doing more with AI, but I don’t know how to start.” Each week, it seems there are new models, new tools, new patterns, new takes on Twitter. It’s a moving train, and figuring […] The post Unsure H...

At Atomic Object we have a pair lunch policy that allows Atoms to take each other out to lunch on the company’s dime. Free lunch is a no-brainer, right? Well, yes, but every time I decide I’m in the mood for a pair lunch, I need to make a few decisions: Who do I ask? […] The post I Almost Built Anot...

Agentic development tools have started to change the way I approach software work. Instead of only asking for a small autocomplete suggestion or a quick explanation, I can now ask an agent to inspect a problem, propose a plan, make code changes, and even iterate on a solution. That can be incredibly...

Most list endpoints start the same way: a SQL query, a few joins, a LIMIT/OFFSET, and a DTO. It works fine. Until it doesn’t. I had a breaking point with a list page that needed to filter by data three relationships away from the root entity. The join got ugly fast. Pagination got weird. Adding […] ...

Whiteboard interviews have quite a reputation in the software development community. Dreaded by most, many companies use intense “LeetCode” style questions, designed to test for depth of algorithmic knowledge. Most of the time, this style of interview can result in those who have only spent time gri...

There’s a lot of talk about growing as makers. While individual contribution can be beneficial, it’s important to highlight and lift up the work your teammates are doing. It’s important for strengthening client relationships, reducing silos, and bringing your fellow workers’ strengths to light. We’r...

Spec-driven development uses upfront documentation to drive implementation. That looks, on the surface, like Waterfall. It isn’t. The difference comes down to four behaviors, which are observable, not philosophical. The Short Answer Waterfall treats documents as gates: write, approve, freeze, hand o...

Wave Function Collapse is an algorithm that generates structured randomness. There are plenty of reasons to want structured randomness. Maybe you want to create a randomized world map, with rivers coming out of lakes, and mountains ranges gradually sloping, like in Minecraft. Or maybe you want to cr...

Eight months ago, I joined a large-scale database migration project. I had already written C# in small Unity AR applications and multiplayer game prototypes but nothing quite of this magnitude. My prior projects had tight scopes and short feedback loops. This codebase has hundreds of thousands of li...

RGB has been the standard color model on the web for decades. It’s widely supported and works well. But it wasn’t designed to replicate the way humans perceive color. oklch() models lightness, chroma, and hue in a way that mirrors human vision. That makes color manipulation more predictable, accessi...

Not everything needs to be AI-powered, even within an AI-first tool. I recently learned this while writing a Claude skill paired with the Claude in Chrome extension, and I got a lot more clarity on how to get the most out of these tools. Here’s what I learned. Writing My First Claude Skill I was […]...

As a software developer, you will need to become familiar with many tools and technologies as you work and grow in the field. This is not helped by the fact that it feels like new tools are being released every day, not to mention new feature updates added to tools you already know. The easiest […] ...

Five years ago, I had just finished three years working here at Atomic Object, and wrote up a blog post reflecting on some of the projects I had worked on, to give a window into what the job is like. Now, in 2026, it’s been eight (!) years since I started. I don’t think I’ve […] The post An Overview...

One of the more noticeable changes with coding agents shows up when you sit down to pair with someone newer to the codebase for mentorship pair programming. On the surface, things can look like they’re going unusually well. Code appears quickly, the structure is reasonable, and there are fewer momen...

I’ve been using Claude Code steadily for the last three-plus months. I wouldn’t call myself a power user, but I’ve settled into a rhythm that works: tight PR loops, lean on it for real feature work, push back when it wanders. Why I Finally Bothered with Claude Code Insights The tooling in this space...

On a recent software development project that already planned to use AWS, we used AWS Cognito for authentication. Cognito is Amazon’s managed identity platform for web and mobile apps, offering features like MFA, password reset flows, and sign-in. On paper, it’s a strong fit for projects already usi...

Most agent setups are overbuilt. You can feel the framework wanting to happen before the problem is even clear. There is a planner, a runtime, a memory layer, a tool registry, a workflow engine, and a long explanation for why all of that is necessary. Then you look at the actual job, and it is […] T...

One might think computer vision models are supposed to be easy to put into production. There are whole companies built on that promise: label a few images, click train, click deploy, done. In practice, it’s messier. Most of us working with these models aren’t ML experts, and moving fast to keep up w...

I’ve been working with AI long enough to be past the “please write an epic poem about my dog” phase and into something that actually moves my work. The real shift for me, in the last couple of months, has been using tools like Claude Cowork and Cursor. It’s not because they generate better prose […]...

I’ve been approached more times than I can count by organizations on LinkedIn, all of them claiming to be impressed by my background and eager to feature my story in their publication. After doing my research, the pattern became clear. Your name gets listed in a booklet for free, but your photo, you...

Anyone who has spent time navigating downtown Raleigh, N.C., knows the routine well. You have a clear destination in mind, you know the most direct route, and with any luck, the lights will cooperate. But Raleigh is a city that never stops evolving. Road construction, lane closures, and unexpected d...

Pair programming has always had a bit of a reputation problem. It’s easy to look at two people working on the same task and see inefficiency. More coordination, more talking, less obvious forward progress. Even on teams that value it, there’s usually some quiet pressure to just go knock something ou...

There’s an assumption floating around right now that working with AI is supposed to feel effortless. When you prompt AI, you describe what you want, iterate a bit, and eventually land on something usable. Sometimes that works. More often, it leads to a long chain of almost-correct outputs, missed ed...

Recently, my software development team needed to upgrade our Expo version (it was at 52). Doing so in a monorepo containing multiple web and mobile apps was a big job—when we upgraded, we’d need to verify that the React and React Native versions in all the apps in the monorepo were compatible with t...

Recently, I was onboarded to a React Native project on a new developer laptop. I realized that the initial setup to launch the app had a few tricks and small gotchas that weren’t obvious at first. Here’s a simple breakdown that will hopefully help if you need it! Setting Up Developer Tools Before co...

I don’t write code, I don’t build models, and a year ago, I was the person Googling, “What is a prompt” while pretending I already knew the answer. Now, I give a talk called “Claude for Normies” to rooms full of professionals who feel the same way I did then. I’ve given it enough times […] The post ...

97% of executives say they’ve deployed AI in the past year. Only 29% say they’re seeing real ROI. (Both from Writer’s 2026 Enterprise AI Adoption survey — 2,400 global leaders) I’ve been sitting with that gap for weeks now — not because the numbers surprise me, but because I keep watching it play ou...

One important practice we employ at Atomic is developer rotations. This provides benefits for the longer-term success of the project and keeps our developers at the top of their game. While you might assume that long-running project teams, living with the project through its conception, implementati...

My software development team had a client who wanted to represent activity on a stage, not in the usual top-down layout that shows up all over the internet. A 3D stage? Reasonable request, slightly unreasonable visual problem. My wacky idea: what if this was mostly CSS? Maybe a little JavaScript. Bu...