Shows / Atomic Spin
Episodes
- Atomic Spin
“Cheaper” Code Makes Creativity More Valuable
When writing code takes less time, we can afford to explore more ideas. A small improvement that once seemed too costly may now deserve a try. Cheaper code…
- Atomic Spin
Your LLM is Both Partner and Stakeholder, and That Changes How You Design
Design has always been the work of figuring out what to build, who to build it for, and whether it’s actually valuable to them. Long before AI entered…
- Atomic Spin
Connect to a VPN-in-a-VM Using WireGuard
I’ve long been a fan of Joe Chrysler’s VPN-in-a-VM technique for dealing with VPN configurations that want to send all traffic from my laptop…
- Atomic Spin
Access Your Version Controlled Configuration from a Docker Container
For years now, I’ve stubbornly duplicated version-controlled configuration files into my running Docker containers. Meaning, instead of making the files…
- Atomic Spin
Agentic Development: The Fun Part Was Never the Typing
Agents are taking the typing. The part of the craft I love is getting more of my time than ever. A little while back I wrote that attention is the new…
- Atomic Spin
How to Tell If a Company’s Culture Is Real Before You Accept the Offer
I’ve worked in software for more than 20 years, most of them at the same company. In that time, I sat through my share of culture presentations, plus…
- Atomic Spin
Consulting Designer Survival Guide 101: How to Adjust to Consulting After Enterprise Work
When I started at Atomic Object in early 2026 (at the time of writing, this was only half a year ago), I was excited at the prospect of working for a…
- Atomic Spin
Range vs. Depth: Having a Generalist on Your Team Gives You Options
Teams that lock into one way of working, or staff every seat to an assumed archetype, lose their ability to flex. The strongest teams I’ve been part of…
- Atomic Spin
Use Scenario Tables to Identify Requirements
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…
- Atomic Spin
Here’s My Network Troubleshooting Toolbox
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…
- Atomic Spin
How to Run SQL Server Outside Docker Sandboxes
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…
- Atomic Spin
How Instagram Knew You Wanted a Tent
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…
- Atomic Spin
What Do Devs, Homemakers, Architects and Pilots Have in Common? Automation.
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…
- Atomic Spin
How I Designed a Roommate Matching Tool on a 20KB Budget
This summer, I had the privilege of working with a nonprofit that helps people with mental illness or intellectual and developmental disabilities find housing…
- Atomic Spin
Understanding iptables with WireGuard
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…
- Atomic Spin
Should AI Really Kill the Code Review? Reflections at LDX3
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…
- Atomic Spin
Look Beyond Velocity: Will This Sprint Unblock the Next One?
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…
- Atomic Spin
The Importance of Play & Whimsy at Work
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…
- Atomic Spin
Reduce AI Decision Fatigue: Lessons from Game Design
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…
- Atomic Spin
Give a Modal Its Own URL in TanStack Router
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…
- Atomic Spin
Start With the Request for Information (RFI)
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…
- Atomic Spin
Write End-to-End Tests in Your Backend’s Language
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…
- Atomic Spin
Working in Kotlin: Waiting Around with Coroutines
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…
- Atomic Spin
Walk the Halls: Visit a Healthcare Company to Build a Better Digital Health Product
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…
- Atomic Spin
My Coding Agents Moved Off My Laptop and Onto a Remote Server
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…
- Atomic Spin
Get Into Agentic Development From the Shallow End
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…
- Atomic Spin
Stop Using Java When Kotlin Exists
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…
- Atomic Spin
A Linux Toolkit for Disk Image Recovery
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…
- Atomic Spin
Even with LLMs, Let’s Pair Together
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…
- Atomic Spin
3 Perks of Working at a Flat Org
Considering starting a software company? Wondering why big corporations are getting away with so much? What about my fellow young professionals: where ya at?…
- Atomic Spin
There Has Never Been a Better Time to Learn the Software Development Lifecycle
Learning the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) has never been easier. When I say “learning,” I mean good old-fashioned reading the docs, trying something…
- Atomic Spin
How AI Let a Non-Technical Delivery Lead Work in the Data Layer
As a delivery lead, data-layer troubleshooting has historically been developer work: SQL fluency, comfort operating in a production database, and the…
- Atomic Spin
Old Capacitors, New Problems: Booting an Apple IIe for the First Time in 30+ Years
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…
- Atomic Spin
My First Agentic Project: The Blank Page Was the Hardest Part
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…
- Atomic Spin
What a Write-Only Architecture Bought Our Health App
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…
- Atomic Spin
Concurrency Control: Your Aggregate Is Single-Threaded. Your Cluster Isn’t.
Concurrency control comes in two kinds, and most distributed-systems failures are a misassignment between them. Let’s look at where to put the…
- Atomic Spin
Don’t Stick a Laser In Your Face (A Parable): Power Tools & Ignorance
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…
- Atomic Spin
Debugging in My First Language: A Bilingual Developer’s Accidental Discovery
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…
- Atomic Spin
Use Curiosity, Craft, and Care to Decide What AI Should Write
Atomic’s Agentic Engineering for Teams describes how work moves through a product backlog, definition, planning, implementation, and review when agents do much…
- Atomic Spin
Build Trust on a Short Software Project
On a short project, clients need evidence not only that work is happening, but that the team knows when to continue, when to change direction, when to raise…
- Atomic Spin
Test GitHub Actions Locally with Act
GitHub Actions are a great way to implement CI/CD into your projects, whether personal or professional. GitHub has a lot of great tools to help with CI/CD, but…
- Atomic Spin
Your Coding Agent Should be in Jail. Here’s Why and How.
The more useful coding agents become, the more access they tend to need. Installing dependencies, running commands, changing files, and generally more autonomy…
- Atomic Spin
2 Changes Made Our Azure Durable Functions 3X Faster
For one of our projects, we run a nightly job that generates a batch of files. It’s a long process: pulling records from an upstream system, calling…
- Atomic Spin
How I Used a Pinterest Board to Get Better Visual Results From Claude Design
I’ve been building out a portfolio site for my creative work. While I have hesitations about mixing AI with my art, I decided to use this website as an…
- Atomic Spin
GitHub Alternative List: Quintessential Options
Every developer knows just how important it is to share work with a coworker. If you are working on a critical feature in a crunch, prompt peer reviews and…
- Atomic Spin
Mixpanel Is Easy to Install. Trusting the Data Takes Work.
Mixpanel makes it easy to start collecting events and building dashboards. The harder part is knowing whether those dashboards represent real product usage. A…
- Atomic Spin
How to Move an AI App from a Frontier Model to Open Weights
At Atomic Object, we’re encouraged to prototype and dogfood internal projects. Over the last four months, I’ve been building a prototype to help solve a part…
- Atomic Spin
What It Takes to Run a Mobile App Beta with Real Customers
Earlier this year, our team shipped two mobile app features for BIGGBY® COFFEE that both touch real money: applying loyalty rewards to an order at checkout…
- Atomic Spin
Review: Codex Tools for Improving Accessibility
Recently, I was met with a situation that you do not wish to run into as a software developer. I was playing a game of baseball, and due to a wild pitch, I…
- Atomic Spin
Weekly Wacky Question: What Constitutes a Meal? What Constitutes an Active User?
Crikey! What a sight we have here! We have a flock of software consultants at a common meeting ground for them in their ecosystem, the communal whiteboard…
- Atomic Spin
Finding Joy in the Challenge: 3 Ways to Navigate Tough Software Projects
Challenging projects are an inevitable part of working in consulting and especially software delivery. Whether it’s navigating a new domain, building trust…
- Atomic Spin
Spec-Driven Hiring Was My Most Useful AI Win of the Year
This year, I used AI to help me fill two roles I had never hired for before: a senior marketing specialist to consult with each of our four regional offices on…
- Atomic Spin
Your Legacy Code Isn’t the Problem
Every so often, a software development project lands on your desk with the shape already decided. The old system is the villain. It’s written in…
- Atomic Spin
2 Years, 2 Swims Around Mackinac Island, & One AI Coach
About a mile from the finish on Sunday, I stopped to take in a gel and some water. And my stomach turned over. I was seven and a half miles around Mackinac…
- Atomic Spin
Two of Everything: What Michigan’s Health System Mergers Reveal About AI
In April, I spent a morning at the Apple Manufacturing Academy Summit at MSU, where Apple and Michigan State train companies to implement AI. The room was…
- Atomic Spin
Skills or Commands and How To Use Them
New agent commands and skills are being created all over the interwebs. Most of the daily emails I subscribe to have become a deluge of new agent workflows…
- Atomic Spin
Pick the Desk Where Your Boss Can See You
When we moved into our new office, the team had to decide where we’d sit. There were two real options: an area all the way across the floor from the…
- Atomic Spin
Why You Should Calibrate Difficult Conversations with Your Team
When and how do you surface a concern to your team? We all observe risks, constraints, or areas for feedback on a daily basis: an estimate that the developers…
- Atomic Spin
Different Ways of Leveraging AI as a Developer: Creating Developer Tools
I’ve developed a set of tasks where I typically leverage AI. Those are things like generating a test, explaining an unfamiliar corner of a codebase, or…
- Atomic Spin
My Codex Workflow So Far and How It Keeps Me Focused
As a developer, I’m always looking for tools that make my life easier. However, with the never-ending stream of updates Codex provides, I hadn’t taken the time…