A product requirements document is a short, shared artifact that states the core problem a piece of work solves and what has to be true to call it done. It is not a full spec with every edge case and acceptance criterion. It sits higher than that: the problem, the goals, the boundaries of scope, […]...

I run a handful of Ubuntu virtual machines in Proxmox. They host applications via Docker Compose, VPN service, NUT services, and a few other odds and ends around my home lab. Virtual machines I’ve created within the last year and a half or so are entirely under the control of OpenTofu (for creating ...

A few years ago, I wrote about the difference between UI and UX design, using the example of Joanna, a busy mom, hiring a designer to help design storage containers to organize her kitchen. Ira, the UI Designer, designed beautiful, ergonomic containers that were more than she had hoped for, but they...

With the rollout of Atomic Object’s agentic delivery model, keeping my thoughts straight has been more challenging than before. Though agentic delivery noticeably speeds up the implementation process, it also increases context-switching for team leads and product folks. It feels more pressing to kee...

For a recent project, I needed a small, representative sample of a large table, and a few circumstances made that less straightforward than it sounds. Here’s the sampling approach I landed on. The job itself was simple enough: run some processing over a configurable slice of a very large table. Not ...

Look at how most software projects are laid out and you’ll spot the same quiet assumption baked into the timeline. There’s a block at the front for design. Discovery, research, some sprints of wireframes and mockups. Then a handoff. Then a long stretch labeled “build.” The design block has a clear e...

My husband runs a pop-up bakery called Molta, and he needed a website. Nothing fancy: who he is, what he bakes, where to find us, etc. For a site this small, the obvious move is to pay for a Squarespace site (or something similar), click a few templates together, and be done in an afternoon. […] The...

As our Raleigh office settled into its new space, we kept coming back to one question: what should we do with our entryway? There’s a big wall visible right from the elevators, which is the first thing people see when they step into Atomic Object Raleigh. We decided to bring in a local artist, Bella...

For most of software’s history, the limit on what you could ship was your hands: how fast you could type, how much you could get built before the day ran out. Agents lifted that limit. A developer can now run several streams of work at once and get through more in an afternoon than used […] The post...

Coding agents are getting pretty good at building screens from a screenshot, Figma link, or a loose description of what you want. But “pretty good” can still mean a lot of small cleanup work: the button is almost right, the spacing is close, the font weight is questionable, and the loading state som...

As an American adopted from China, I have always wanted to learn Mandarin to connect more with my culture. After enrolling in a local beginner Mandarin course, I decided I wanted to use flashcards to supplement my learning. I tested out a few flashcard apps, but wasn’t fully satisfied with any of th...

I went into a recent project excited. The newer LLM tools had crossed a threshold for me. They felt like something I could finally lean on hard for a tricky visual-design problem: cross-domain research, concept generation, and prototyping all running in one loop. I was genuinely confident going in. ...

It’s three in the afternoon, and Claude Code asks me, for the 40th time today, whether it can run a command. I glance at it, hit Allow, and keep moving. I didn’t really read it. The thirty-ninth time, I didn’t read that one either. That reflex is the problem. Every permission prompt is supposed to [...

I am no stranger to working up and down the stack. To me, it’s part of the challenge, and I love a complex chunk of work. I will choose stories in the backlog requiring parallel frontend and backend changes just for fun. Lately, I have come to appreciate how simple tools like Swagger make it […] The...

In the past few years, AI has woven itself into nearly every corner of how we work, communicate, and make decisions. Hiring algorithms screen (and discard) resumes before a human ever reads them. Automated systems flag fraud, recommend medical treatments, and help determine prison sentences. The ass...

I sat across from Michael Levy at a room full of healthcare and technology leaders recently. We were talking about why digital transformation projects fail at such a startling rate, 95% of them, by some estimates. His answer surprised the room. It wasn’t the technology, the budget, or the vendor. It...

My current software project had an issue, and, over time, it has become more of an issue as coding agents have gotten better. That problem is running parallel agents in our codebase while providing them strong methods to validate their work. The codebase was started in 2021. That’s before agentic co...

Perhaps due to working with AI coding agents inside of a VM, I’ve found myself spending more time in terminal applications lately. Terminal Applications In addition to the agent harness applications, I’ve also been using several other TUI (Terminal User Interface) applications heavily. lazygit – a t...

I recently started creating a real-time ship combat game where multiple players compete to be the last one standing. The game needs to be playable over LAN, and I would like to create SDKs for developers to write bots to play in addition to human players playing themselves. To achieve this, I first ...

During the definition and planning phase of our current project, my team generated a lot of written specs. Seventeen feature specs, plus a PRD, a data model, and a handful of supporting reference docs. All of them are in Markdown, all living in the repo. That’s great for handing context back to an A...

I would bring my cats everywhere with me if I could, including to work. Since that’s not really an option, I decided to make them part of my Codex setup instead. I used codex-pets.net to turn my two tabby cats into a custom Codex Pet. To upload a Codex Pet, you need two files: pet.json […] The post ...

Years ago, I started a Zettlekasten-style collection of notes using Emacs’ org-roam package. A Zettlekasten system is typically comprised of hundreds of linked notes covering all topics of interest to the maintainer (if you’re interested in learning more on such systems, I recommend the book How To ...

My partner is a full-time artist, and a lot of that work comes from art commissions. And it isn’t a small amount of commissions either. There are some points where he takes up to 90 commissions at once. And for a long time, the whole operation ran on sticky notes. To me, the process was […] The post...

Frontier AI models today are incredibly powerful. They excel not just at writing bits of code but also at assisting with planning and architecture. They are also increasingly expensive. Early on in the AI era, developers had the luxury of tossing around tokens willy-nilly, delegating any task imagin...

For most of my career, I had a decent sense for answering two questions: how much work is ready to go, and how long is it going to take? I could look at a healthy backlog with a couple of weeks of estimated stories, do some math, and give a pretty good guess of what […] The post Human Habits for Lea...

Rails gave web developers a durable caching model. Cache the outer fragment. Reuse the inner fragments that did not change. The Rails caching guide calls this Russian doll caching. You Can Use Russian Doll Caching at the Edge. The same idea now applies outside the template. The dolls can span the br...

More than once in my career, I became that architect: the one the support team calls when something breaks in production, when a change request related to a complex feature is raised, or when a new team member needs to understand why the system works the way it does. Requirements documents, use case...

I live in a small apartment in Chicago with no closets, which means storage is not something I can take for granted. It is an ongoing design challenge. So, I’ve had to get creative. Every square foot has to earn its keep, while still feeling aesthetically like “me.” I built an open-shelf “closet” in...

If you want to see where clinical AI actually breaks, skip the vendor deck. Watch season two, episode six, of The Pitt. Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) rolls out an AI tool that writes the charts. It cuts documentation time by eighty percent. More time at the bedside. More time at home. Who say...

The longstanding adage that communication is key will ring true perpetually, especially when executing software delivery. Proper communication has the power to set the foundation for a project to either consistently thrive or create continuous bottlenecks that adversely impact productivity. The reci...