A few years back, I created portable-color for adding color to shell scripts. Then I deprecated it in favor of a new library, dye, that fixed a number of things that bothered me about portable-color. dye eventually added its own built-in templating, which meant users could just print a string full o...

Previously, I showed how you can use JSDoc and jsconfig.json as a replacement for TypeScript style type checking — without a build step, no less. At the end of that post I teased an ESLint follow-up. And here we are, I’m happy you’re here. First Things First Before jumping in, I wanted to address a ...

I’ve never really been great at side questing in video games. In most games I play, I tend to lock in on the main storyline. The objective is clear, the path is defined, and progress feels measurable. Side quests exist but they get pushed off with the assumption that I’ll come back to them later. […...

Over the past 14 months on my current project with an AI startup, I’ve typed out an average novel length’s worth of meeting notes. Here’s a quick summary: Metric Value Total files (1 file per meeting) 132 Total words 77,967 Total characters 429,329 Average words per file ~590 Average characters per ...

I don’t know about most developers, but there is a very specific kind of sinking feeling you get when you join a project, clone a repo, and realize you’ve just inherited a total disaster. I’m talking about the kind of codebase where you don’t even know left from right: unhelpful generic variable nam...

In previous posts, I examined claims about “building a product in one day” and discussed my attempt to take a game from wireframe to working prototype. Here’s what happened next. By the time the game was fully built, tested, and stable, there was one step left that felt harder than anything technica...

In a previous post, I wrote about the idea of “launching a product in one day.” Today, let’s talk about how I took the initial idea and turned it into a working prototype. In the first phase of building my puzzle game, I wasn’t thinking about deployment or databases. I was thinking about mechanics, ...

If you spend any time on YouTube right now, you’ve probably seen the headlines: “I built a SaaS in 24 hours.” “AI built this app for me.” “From idea to launch overnight.” I genuinely enjoy those AI product development videos. They’re motivating. They make building feel accessible. They show what’s p...

My client team recently updated its code review policy: an approval from an AI tool is now all that’s needed to merge. In this post, I’ll reflect on this change and what it means for the way our team works together. My Personal Relationship with Code Review Reviewing PRs is one of my very favorite [...

When I joined Atomic Object nearly 16 years ago, I was drawn in by many factors: people who were generous with their time, interesting development tools and clients, personal connections, and wanting to work with the smartest people I could find. Threaded through all of that was a deep curiosity tha...

At Atomic Object, we build great software, and we partner with our clients to help them figure out what the right thing to be building is in the first place. As software consultants, we show up as strategic thought partners who bring perspective on direction, tradeoffs, and timing. Getting that righ...

When ChatGPT went mainstream, the narrative was clear: anyone can build an app now. Software engineering, as we know it, is over. My Bias I’ll be honest about my bias. I run a software consultancy with about 100 software engineers. I have skin in this game. But from my front-row seat, what I’ve watc...

Running and deploying with Kubernetes may sound excessive and intimidating, but it’s not nearly as hard as it once was. The immense popularity of Kubernetes over the past decade means tools can quickly set up and deploy a cluster in almost any environment. And what once was a technology platform req...

I have long been a fan of OpenBSD, over two and a half decades after I first started using it. It’s a complete operating system maintained with a strong and smart design ethos. It makes sense to me in a way that makes every other operating system feel frankly kind of cobbled together. Many folks […]...

AI tools have made it easier than ever to build and ship software. On one of my recent projects, I’ve seen firsthand how quickly a team can generate features, prototype ideas, and release new functionality. But I’ve also noticed something else. Just because we can build faster doesn’t mean we’re lea...

In a time of pressing adaptation to AI, it’s tempting to get to the result with fast prompts. But I’ve found that with some planning before prompting, I get better results that scale well. Here’s what I ask before I get started. What is the end goal? Am I solving a bug ticket? If it’s […] The post Q...

In previous posts, I have written about my Proxmox Backup client helper scripts and an Ansible role to provision them. The main limitation of the prior version of the scripts is that they could only specify one backup target file or directory. Now they can target multiple. Backup scripts improvement...

Picture Monday morning at a growing virtual diabetes clinic. Over the weekend, 800 patients called or messaged about refills, scheduling, and portal issues. Fifteen support reps are already behind before they log in. Your board wants higher self‑service and lower unit costs. Clinical leaders want le...

Outside of my 9 to 5 job as a software engineer, I play keys in a six-person cover band. A few months back, our drummer came into rehearsal exclaiming, “Georgia, you won’t believe what I found on Facebook Marketplace!” He reached into his backpack and pulled out an Omnichord. What the heck is an Omn...

Here’s how I replaced Payload CMS’s built-in login system with Better Auth so an Next.js site and its Payload admin panel could share the same authenticated session. Using Payload CMS If you’re comfortable working in a Next.js app, and you haven’t given Payload CMS a try, you really should. It’s a c...

I like the basic idea of snapshot tests. Many software developers first run into them in frontend work, where you snapshot rendered output and compare it later after a code change. That feels pretty natural. You are checking whether the shape of the result changed in a way you expected. On a recent ...

You might be familiar with this classic XKCD strip about SQL injection: What’s happening here? Imagine there is a form where a student can fill in their name, and this input gets incorporated into a SQL query. Something like: When the name is interpolated into that query, it becomes: SQL statements ...

On a recent project, my client had a firm rule: one commit per pull request. No exceptions. At first, it seemed like a minor constraint. But it quickly pushed me to get comfortable with a handful of Git commands I’d been using only occasionally: git commit, git rebase, and git reset –soft. Each one ...

This spring, I went to North Carolina State University’s Engineering Career Fair a second time, but this time I was standing behind the table. Accelerator A year ago, I found Atomic Object through the NC State career fair and ended up applying for the Accelerator program. This year I was representin...

If you’re commute-curious but haven’t pulled the trigger yet, I’ve been there. Most of what felt like obstacles to biking to work turned out to be either mental barriers or have simple solutions. Somewhere on the other side of figuring that out, I realized I was actually looking forward to it each m...

As a Quality Assurance analyst, I have tested more forms and input fields than I would like to admit. I recently onboarded to a software development project where a user must create an organization before accessing most other sections of the app. This process requires entering company data into abou...

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been thinking a lot about how AI is reshaping the way we work as developers. Tools like Claude Code have become part of my daily workflow, and they’ve changed how I approach feature development in a big way. But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: the quality [...

At Atomic Object, kickoff meetings are a cornerstone of how we start projects. We’ve built significant internal infrastructure around planning and delivering them. That’s because how you begin sets the tone for everything that follows. For longer-term engagements, though, the kickoff is only part of...

Recently, I’ve been performing some heavy lifting on my client project in the form of state management. For context, we use Angular on our front end, and need to keep tabs on all data points a user is changing. Our team chose to use NgRx, a state management tool based on React’s Redux package, but [...

Let’s say you install a tool. Maybe it’s Node, or maybe it’s a CLI for a project you just cloned. The installer runs successfully. Then you open your terminal and type: node And your shell responds: zsh: command not found: node A completely normal reaction to seeing “command not found.” At some poin...