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...

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...