Successful relationships – both inside or outside of business – require a focused effort to meet others where they are to build connections. Without a strong relationship, navigating obstacles and aligning on goals is exponentially more difficult. A key tool for achieving this is mindfulness – the d...

This Snake project is a useful way to study how a simple game-playing agent works end-to-end. It is small enough to read quickly, but complete enough to show the important parts: state representation, neural network inference, scoring, and iteration through training. Read on to learn: Why Snake work...

As with most peers I know, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it actually means to be a software developer right now. There seem to be two predominant takes floating around the industry right now about AI and the future of dev work. The first is that software developers are going the way of […] The...

Detroit has always been a city of systems. Long before people talked about “platforms” or “digital transformation,” Detroit was solving a harder problem: how to coordinate thousands of moving parts with precision. Assembly lines, supplier networks, logistics routes—these weren’t just operations. The...

As software developers, we’ve all been there: a simple requirement change requires adding a tenantId field to your User model. It’s a five-minute code change, but suddenly, 458 tests are failing. It’s happening not because the logic is broken, but because the User model is used everywhere, and now t...

Somewhere in your backlog is a ticket for a bug you already fixed. The user just didn’t know. Writing Release Notes Nobody Reads My software team recently took over the release notes process. Originally, we started with a long document that comprehensively covered each JIRA ticket, complete with a F...

This tutorial is for developers, designers who code, or anyone new to AI who wants a hands-on introduction to building a custom AI chatbot that can search and answer questions using your own data. I wanted to build an AI-powered tool for our team, but I had zero experience building AI applications—s...

For years, designers waited on development. We’d finish research, deliver specs, hand off mockups — and then sit in a holding pattern while engineers built what we’d envisioned. The bottleneck was implementation. Design was ready. Dev needed time. That dynamic has completely flipped. Development spe...

Building connections that lead to successful relationships – both inside or outside of business – require a focused effort to meet others where they are. Without a strong relationship, navigating obstacles and aligning on goals is exponentially more difficult. A key tool for achieving this is mindfu...

photo by ajay_suresh In a previous post, I wrote about building my support team early during my second pregnancy. I talked about doulas, night nurses, and the support network I wished I had the first time around. Planning my return to work is another part of that same preparation. Specifically, retu...

Every project benefits from lightweight CLI scripts that can reach into your application code — for data seeding, format verification, one-off exports, and other tasks that don’t deserve a full endpoint or test harness but need access to your real domain logic. A few years ago, I wrote about adding ...

If multiple users can edit the same record, developers need to decide how your system handles that. If you don’t, EF Core decides for you. Designing Intentional Conflict Handling in .NET Applications By default, EF Core uses last write wins. The final call to SaveChanges() overwrites whatever came b...

All good nerds love a good dashboard, right? So when I saw people building Claude Code dashboards online, I wanted to learn from my own usage. The reason dashboards were having a moment online was that Claude Code has built-in OpenTelemetry support. That means you can pipe metrics and logs to any OT...

A few months into a recent project, my software development team hit a bug that took much longer to diagnose than it should have. We were generating PDFs server-side — filling in form fields with data from our system, saving the document, and returning it to the user. In Adobe Acrobat, the fields lo...

My experience with AI coding agents, like Claude Code, Codex CLI, or Augment Code’s Auggie has been that they are most effective when they can run autonomously, without frequent human intervention. In order to do that the AI needs permissions to make changes to the codebase, run tests, perform web s...

LLMs and code generation are extremely powerful tools when working as a solo game developer. I made two attempts to build a game leveraging AI code generation, specifically GPT-5.3 Codex. The first attempt led to frustration and feeling like I lost creative control of the project. In a second attemp...

Aristotle gets credit for first principles thinking, but the concept has never been more relevant than it is right now. As we shift to building software with AI tools, this is one of the most important mental models you can carry into every client engagement. The Core Idea First principles thinking ...

When you support multiple offices, marketing gets complicated quickly. Each location has its own strategy, its own managing partners, and its own priorities. But the processes are often similar. On paper, this sounds totally manageable. “We’ll just support each office!” Easy enough, right? In realit...

I’ve been experimenting with how I use AI in my development workflow for the last few months. I’ve been using Cursor for a while now, but I finally decided to jump on the Claude Code hype train after hearing the powerful things people on my team were using it for. I’ve been resistant to AI […] The p...

When MIT released The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, they found that roughly 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver tangible, measurable, or financial value to the organization. Ninety-five percent of AI projects. That’s an estimated $30-40 billion in capital investment annually, a...

In Android, there are many ways to persist data. We have Room for databases, in-memory storage, SharedPreferences, and DataStore. One interesting method is SavedStateHandle, which serves a specific purpose: preserving UI state through process death. The Problem: Process Death. Let’s start with a rel...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I like many found myself with a lot of free time. So like many others, I deciding to spend way too much time on my computer. This led to ultimately running into frustration with the lack of a unified theme system. with MacOS, which not longer ran well the ancient 2013 [...

Recently, I covered some FAQs on Atomic’s Accelerator program — what it is, how hiring works, and how to stand out as a candidate. If you haven’t read that yet, and it fits your situation, I recommend circling back. This FAQ is about the Atomic Experience. The work, the culture, and what growth look...

Some cultures don’t have a distinct word for the color blue; instead, it’s considered a shade of green. Identifying bugs can be a lot like that. It’s difficult to see them as separate from “how the software works” when they blend in. With AI, it’s easier than ever to generate code. But software can ...

Fast-moving projects can be really fun to work on, but they’re also mentally expensive. When priorities shift rapidly and you’re juggling features, bugs, code reviews, and meetings, you’re just as bottlenecked by time as you are by cognitive load. Here are some ways to reduce that load without slowi...

Every team I’ve been on lately has communicated through Slack. And I mean every team—even the client teams who otherwise run an entirely corporate IT stack. Slack is the place where people hash things out, right up until they jump on a Zoom meeting. Slack is also the place where valuable information...