Recently I worked on a feature that didn’t have any UI. When a customer is on a payment plan, their account has a due date, and the plan has its own payment schedule. The feature kept those two in sync. A job ran every night, looked at the plan and any payments that had come […] The post Use Scenari...

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been experimenting a bit with WireGuard lately. In the process, I’ve been learning about a number of network troubleshooting commands, and before I forget what they all are and do, I’m going to capture them here so I (and you!) can find them again. Here’s my n...

Like many of my colleagues, I’ve been experimenting with tooling around sandboxed agents. Lately for me this looks like a handful of Claude Code agents, each in an isolated Docker sbx. Today I’m going to share what it took to give them access to a test database. SQL Server and Docker sbx My current ...

Have you ever wondered how targeted ads end up in your Instagram feed? You might look at a tent on some outdoor retailer’s site once, and the next day your feed is Reels about campsites and an ad for that same tent. You never searched for camping on Instagram, so why is it all over […] The post How ...

What do devs, homemakers, architects, and pilots have in common? They’ve all had part of their job automated, and it changed how they work. Atomic Object is adopting agentic engineering, a delivery process where AI agents write much of the code. I’m a Quality Analyst (QA) on a large project team wit...

This summer, I had the privilege of working with a nonprofit that helps people with mental illness or intellectual and developmental disabilities find housing. A lot of them can’t afford rent on their own, but splitting it with someone creates options. We created a tool that helps them find that som...

I’ve been playing around with WireGuard a bit lately, and one of the things that keeps coming up is the iptables tool. Over the years, I’ve encountered iptables here and there, but it’s always been a bit of a black box to me. I’d be trying to accomplish something that would need it, and while […] Th...

I recently went to LeadDev’s LDX3 engineering conference in New York, and one question kept coming up: what happens to code review now that AI writes so much of our code? It’s been on a lot of people’s minds lately, including mine. It came up in many of the sessions I went to, even ones […] The post...

I love seeing a team finish more work than expected in a sprint. It’s always exciting to have so much new functionality to show off to our stakeholders. However, I also want to ensure that the work completed allows us to keep moving next sprint. Unfortunately, we can have a great sprint on paper and...

Children don’t solve for play or whimsy. It’s a natural state of being, and many experiences we have in our youth are linked to imagination in some way. When I was younger, to feel imaginative meant to change the world around me, and that immersion drove my definition, understanding, and interaction...

I have been facing a significant amount of decision fatigue when using AI for development. I’ll spend close to eight hours a day, five days of the week, prompting, planning, and reviewing code. This leads to decision fatigue, where I become less able to make sound decisions as the day goes on. Growi...

I recently built an app whose main screen is a wall of photos. Every item is a card in a masonry grid, and a sidebar of filters narrows the wall down. Click a card, and a detail dialog opens over the grid. I wanted that dialog to have a URL. Copy the address bar, send […] The post Give a Modal Its O...

More and more founders and teams are reaching out to us with a request for proposal (RFP) in hand. Increasingly, there’s a pattern behind it: they built a proof of concept with AI, then asked AI to turn it into an RFP. The document is lengthy, structured, and confident. I understand the instinct. Th...

In part one of this series, I discussed the pros and cons of using Kotlin. In part two,  let’s talk about waiting. Your application probably does a lot of it. Waiting for a database, waiting for an API, waiting for a second API because apparently the first one didn’t have enough information. Our com...

I spent the first seven years of my product career in healthcare. The best days on the job were the days I got to “walk the halls” with the clinical teams. Seeing the space gives you a sense of perspective about the work that you just can’t replicate. Walking the halls One cold morning in […] The po...

A workflow is running, and I need to close my laptop. Maybe I’m at a meeting, the end of the day, somewhere without a connection. If the agent is running on the laptop, closing the lid ends the run. For a while, I planned around it: before I left, I made sure agents were wrapping […] The post My Cod...

If you’re anything like me, enabling that “Approve for me” setting in your agentic coding tool of choice feels like a big step. Waiting for approval prompts isn’t the best use of my time, but I’m still skeptical enough that I don’t trust the agent to decide entirely for itself when it needs my input...

Despite its many flaws, Java is a fantastic language for a variety of reasons. It’s portable, runs on every device and hosting provider, and is easy to learn. It even has pretty good performance in many aspects due to its just-in-time compiler (which has been recently updated!). On top of that, it’s...

Deleting a file does not always remove its contents right away. A raw disk image may still contain deleted file entries and data in space the filesystem has marked for reuse. The tools in this guide examine three layers of a disk image: files that still exist, deleted files the filesystem can identi...

For all the good and bad that has come with the LLM domination of software development recently, one aspect I can definitely appreciate is that everything feels on the table when it comes to figuring out how to best approach our jobs. Granted, that’s also the part that terrifies me. It’s definitely ...

Considering starting a software company? Wondering why big corporations are getting away with so much? What about my fellow young professionals: where ya at? Or developers looking for a way into the workforce? I know there are plenty of y’all out there who are already burnt out from corporate life, ...

Learning the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) has never been easier. When I say “learning,” I mean good old-fashioned reading the docs, trying something, failing, trying again, probably failing once more, and finally succeeding. Whatever part of the lifecycle you want to understand still needs ...

As a delivery lead, data-layer troubleshooting has historically been developer work: SQL fluency, comfort operating in a production database, and the confidence to investigate without breaking anything. For an accounting-based client, when their data didn’t reconcile or make sense, that question wen...

While helping clean out the garage of my grandfather’s friend, I found something that caused me to nearly drop what I was carrying. I found an Apple IIe, Monitor II, and an Apple ImageWriter, all stored in their original packaging! Apple released the Apple IIe in January of 1983 as the “enhanced” ve...

I expected my first project using agentic development to feel smooth and easy to pick up from day one. After all, I read Atomic’s agentic playbook and stayed up to date on the latest trends and models. But when I started, I suddenly had more questions than answers. Do I need to design this whole […]...

If you’ve built software in healthcare, you know the usual arrangement. The firm signs a business associate agreement, the developers get PHI access, and everyone agrees to be careful. Careful means scrubbing logs, keeping patient data out of screenshots and tickets, and trusting that nobody pastes ...

Concurrency control comes in two kinds, and most distributed-systems failures are a misassignment between them.  Let’s look at where to put the single-writer guarantee, what each placement costs, and why the cheapest one has no failure mode at all. There are two mechanisms for keeping two things fro...

Imagine this… A company unveils a brand new, high-tech laser cutter. It’s cutting-edge technology (if you’ll pardon the pun): incredibly strong, incredibly practical, incredibly easy to use. People are fascinated; this is so cool! People start cutting out their designs in the laser cutter. They see ...

I was working with Codex on a CQRS architectural issue, which was new for me, when something unexpected happened. Most of my experience has been in CRUD-style applications, where you read and write to the same model and the mental model is fairly straightforward: one source of truth, one path in and...

The browser is often the easiest part of an end-to-end test. Consider a test that verifies a user can complete an overdue task. The visible interaction is small: sign in, find the task, click Complete, and observe the new status. Before any of that can happen, the test needs a workspace, a user, a p...