To lay things out on the table, this isn’t an “AI Bad, Humans Good” blog post. No-code tools have made it easier for non-developers to prototype basic apps, and coding agents have made it quicker for developers to get the first pass of a feature written. Agentic development hasn’t made writing human...

Shadcn is a set of reusable UI component patterns for use with React applications. However, instead of importing the elements like a traditional component library (@somewhere/ui), you add a local copy of the component source files into your project. This allows you to customize, extend, and shape th...

With the recent changes in agentic delivery, costs of development are going down, and processes are changing. That means there’s more time to try different methods and figure things out. Software today can still be clunky and irritating, with systems that take a lot of manual effort to glue together...

Agentic Android development works best when agents can build, install, run, test, and validate features against real devices or emulators without relying on Android Studio as the manual control center. In this article, “skills” means reusable agent instructions for a specific task, and “workflows” m...

As a software developer at Atomic Object, one of the expectations (and perks) of the job is taking advantage of professional development opportunities outside of work. Recently, I attended Code Remix, a developer-centric conference in Miami as my annual professional development experience. Through t...

For the past four months, I have been volunteering with the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) initiative as a facilitator running creative writing workshops inside Ann Arbor prisons. Coincidentally, here at Atomic Object, I am currently working on a team creating digital systems for the Michigan C...

We’re in a time of accelerated innovation. Some say the AI bubble is going to pop, while some are betting everything on it being the future. As a participant in the development industry, sticking your head in the sand can be fatal. Yet, hopping on the hype train can seem intimidating or feel aimless...

AI coding tools are getting wildly useful. They can scaffold features, explain code, write tests, refactor awkward functions, and sometimes make you feel like you suddenly hired a few extra developers who never sleep. That is exciting, and it really can change how fast teams move. But there is a tra...

The recent Trivy GitHub Actions security incident got me thinking more seriously about the security model around CI systems. Most teams spend a lot of time thinking about dependency security, but I increasingly think GitHub Actions workflows deserve to be viewed through the exact same lens. In some ...

Update: This post was written prior to the GSD repository being abandoned by its maintainer. The future of GSD is uncertain, but the lessons from this can be applied to other spec-driven development frameworks. My Intro To GSD I first used the Get Shit Done spec-driven development system for Claude ...

As a Junior Developer who is just starting out, I never really got to witness the world of Software design without virtual backlog management. I often hear about the boards filled with sticky notes as the backlog stand-in, but I always just assumed that since we don’t do it anymore, it must be ineff...

A few weeks ago, I asked my younger brother a very random question: “What would the consequences be of putting higher performance shock absorbers in my car?” Question One He led me down an interesting conversation about the costs, the considerations, the damage it could do to my very simple Mazda CX...

Not all questions are created equal. Recently, some discourse has been happening in my early career program around finding our voice, participating in meetings, and asking questions. This tends to be harder for early-career people for a multitude of reasons. I think a common denominator for a lot of...

Every year, the Merge conference in Grand Rapids brings together software developers, designers, product leaders, and technology professionals from across West Michigan to discuss how our industry is changing. Organized by Software GR, the conference has become a space for practical conversations ab...

Below, you’ll find a tour of CQRS, Event Sourcing, and Projections as they actually appear in a real production NestJS + KurrentDB + PostgreSQL + Drizzle codebase. It’s roughly a 15-minute read. The goal is not just to discuss what these patterns are, but why they are shaped the way they are, and wh...

Smart home devices are usually sold on convenience. Control the lights from your phone. Turn down the thermostat from bed. Get a camera notification when someone walks up to the porch. Automate the boring stuff and feel like you are living slightly closer to the future. That future gets a lot less f...

Have you ever wondered if there was an easier way to sort imports automatically in your Angular project? Disorganized imports make code harder to read, slow down code reviews, and cause unnecessary merge conflicts. Sorting them manually requires a lot of effort — what if you could automate it? Intro...

A few months ago I watched a sprint board do something I’d never quite seen before. Story cards weren’t stacking up in In Progress. They were stacking up in Ready for Review. On every project I’d ever worked on, the bottleneck was writing the code. Suddenly, on this project, it wasn’t. So how’d we g...

We are producing more with AI. What we’re producing less of, apparently, is honest reflection on what that actually means. The internet is full of frameworks, prompt guides, and tutorials promising you’ll “10x your productivity overnight.” The question nobody seems to want to answer is whether any o...

How do you currently give feedback to new team members as they’re onboarding in their new role? How do you set clear expectations for them of what success looks like? When we onboarded two delivery leads to the Ann Arbor office last year, we experimented with a lightweight informal feedback framewor...

I’ve been talking to a lot of people lately who say some version of the same thing: “I know I should be doing more with AI, but I don’t know how to start.” Each week, it seems there are new models, new tools, new patterns, new takes on Twitter. It’s a moving train, and figuring […] The post Unsure H...

At Atomic Object we have a pair lunch policy that allows Atoms to take each other out to lunch on the company’s dime. Free lunch is a no-brainer, right? Well, yes, but every time I decide I’m in the mood for a pair lunch, I need to make a few decisions: Who do I ask? […] The post I Almost Built Anot...

Agentic development tools have started to change the way I approach software work. Instead of only asking for a small autocomplete suggestion or a quick explanation, I can now ask an agent to inspect a problem, propose a plan, make code changes, and even iterate on a solution. That can be incredibly...

Most list endpoints start the same way: a SQL query, a few joins, a LIMIT/OFFSET, and a DTO. It works fine. Until it doesn’t. I had a breaking point with a list page that needed to filter by data three relationships away from the root entity. The join got ugly fast. Pagination got weird. Adding […] ...

Whiteboard interviews have quite a reputation in the software development community. Dreaded by most, many companies use intense “LeetCode” style questions, designed to test for depth of algorithmic knowledge. Most of the time, this style of interview can result in those who have only spent time gri...

There’s a lot of talk about growing as makers. While individual contribution can be beneficial, it’s important to highlight and lift up the work your teammates are doing. It’s important for strengthening client relationships, reducing silos, and bringing your fellow workers’ strengths to light. We’r...

Spec-driven development uses upfront documentation to drive implementation. That looks, on the surface, like Waterfall. It isn’t. The difference comes down to four behaviors, which are observable, not philosophical. The Short Answer Waterfall treats documents as gates: write, approve, freeze, hand o...

Wave Function Collapse is an algorithm that generates structured randomness. There are plenty of reasons to want structured randomness. Maybe you want to create a randomized world map, with rivers coming out of lakes, and mountains ranges gradually sloping, like in Minecraft. Or maybe you want to cr...

Eight months ago, I joined a large-scale database migration project. I had already written C# in small Unity AR applications and multiplayer game prototypes but nothing quite of this magnitude. My prior projects had tight scopes and short feedback loops. This codebase has hundreds of thousands of li...

RGB has been the standard color model on the web for decades. It’s widely supported and works well. But it wasn’t designed to replicate the way humans perceive color. oklch() models lightness, chroma, and hue in a way that mirrors human vision. That makes color manipulation more predictable, accessi...