Shows / Atomic Spin
Episodes
- Atomic Spin
Why I Keep Reaching for SQLAlchemy
I used to think SQLAlchemy was mostly a way to avoid writing SQL. That wasn’t a compelling pitch. I already knew SQL. Why add another abstraction and…
- Atomic Spin
Our AI Code Review Workflow, 7 Months Later
About seven months ago, I wrote about using AI for code reviews. At the time, it felt pretty novel. I had a GitHub Action that gathered up our Cursor rules…
- Atomic Spin
Fabled Too Hard? How I Stay Engaged in AI Development
At this point, I’m about three years into my AI adoption, and throughout the process I’ve learned what burns me out, what speeds me up, what helps…
- Atomic Spin
Stop Trying to Make Your AI Writing Sound Human
My colleague Sam posted recently about LinkedIn shipping a “seems like AI slop” button. His take: it’s pointed at the wrong target, because…
- Atomic Spin
How I Accidentally Built an AI Cycling Coach
This spring I built myself an AI cycling coach. It reads my actual ride data, knows what my week looks like and writes my training around both. I’m not a…
- Atomic Spin
AI Agents: Experience Doesn’t Fit in a Prompt
On a recent project, our team experimented with spec-driven development using AI agents. We expected to spend more time writing specifications and documenting…
- Atomic Spin
Keep Calm and Carry On… With Your Demo
Live software demos have a special way of finding the one thing you did not rehearse. I recently put together a complicated sprint demo involving manual and…
- Atomic Spin
Agentic Development in Practice: We Handed Off the Code, Not the Job
Atomic recently published Agentic Engineering for Teams, our process-level guide to pairing with AI agents for sustainable speed. This post is the view from…
- Atomic Spin
Keep Calm and Test On: Quality Assurance in the Age of Agentic Development
Agentic development is fast. An agent can scaffold a feature, write the tests it thinks it needs, and open a pull request before you’ve finished your…
- Atomic Spin
Here’s How We’re Successfully Hiring Junior Talent in the Age of AI
I recently had the good fortune of speaking at CascadiaJS (shoutout to Carter Rabasa and the whole CJS team for putting on a truly wonderful event). I wanted…
- Atomic Spin
I Stopped Hand-Building Slide Decks. Now I Dictate Them.
I’ve made a lot of slide decks for design work presentations over the years. It started with PowerPoint, where one minor movement of an image or…
- Atomic Spin
How I Rebuilt My Development Workstation for Agentic Work
‘For most of my eight-year career, my development environment was never really designed. It accumulated. Every new project, language, and workflow added…
- Atomic Spin
Here’s How to “Slice” a Redesign the Agentic Way
On my latest project, I was tasked with rebuilding a mobile app’s order customization workflow. This included work such as modifying the product itself and…
- Atomic Spin
What’s the Buzz Around Loops?
I was at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and one phrase was everywhere: loops. The line everyone riffed on came from…
- Atomic Spin
Write Documentation for Yourself, Not Others
Anyone working on software can speak to the importance of documentation. They will tell you how helpful well-written documentation is, and how they would be…
- Atomic Spin
Ecosystems Don’t Run on Goodwill. They Run on Software.
Every city with innovation ambitions has the same ingredients list: capital, talent, universities, corporates, founders, and a calendar full of convenings…
- Atomic Spin
Build Fast and Shallow on Purpose
Every team optimizes for something, whether or not anyone says so out loud. Some optimize for reliability, some for speed to market, some for polish. Building…
- Atomic Spin
The Velocity Trap: Why the Best Software Architects Move the Slowest
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the pace of our work. If you’re like me, you’ve probably noticed that using LLMs and AI agents can accelerate our…
- Atomic Spin
How to Help a Political Campaign as a Programmer
A political campaign runs on volunteers, and almost none of those volunteers are programmers. For more than the past six months, I’ve been volunteering…
- Atomic Spin
How to Use CI as Your Agent Loop
Agent loops are in fashion these days, so I thought I’d talk about one of my favorite ones. Strangely, designing a useful agent loop turns out to be…
- Atomic Spin
Get Good Results from AI Tools: Define, Feed, Check
I’ve been preparing a talk on getting real, reliable work out of AI, and I went down a deep research rabbit hole along the way. I read peer-reviewed…
- Atomic Spin
4 Terminal Tools I Recommend to New Developers
Recently, we welcomed a bright new member of Atomic’s Accelerator to our team. Coming straight from school, they’ve had limited exposure to development in the…
- Atomic Spin
Fix Common Google Sheets Mistakes (and a Few Easy Wins)
Google Sheets is one of those tools that feels forgiving, and it becomes miserably unhelpful when it breaks. You type something in, drag a formula down, and…
- Atomic Spin
Design Doesn’t Have A Finish Line
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…
- Atomic Spin
It’s Not Up to You to Prove AI Makes You Faster
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the AI Engineer World’s Fair. I stepped off the subway and made my way up the stairs toward…
- Atomic Spin
Atomic Object Raleigh Is Now a Majority-Women Office
In late June, our office quietly crossed a threshold worth reflecting on. With two new accelerators joining the team, we now have 9 women and 7 men in our…
- Atomic Spin
Who Decides What’s Worth Building? Growing Judgment Work Across the Team
Agentic engineering is changing the shape of how software teams work, and in doing so, is raising the value of judgment work. Strong consulting on what’s…
- Atomic Spin
Grep Is 10,000x Faster Than Your Eyeballs — But You Can Still See
If you’ve been a developer for a while, you’re probably adopting AI one way or another. I still remember the early days when prompts never got me…
- Atomic Spin
Error Handling vs. Hiding Errors
Every software system fails. This is inevitable. But burying errors doesn’t make them go away. As developers, we want to believe that our systems work as…
- Atomic Spin
Here’s How We’re Using AI Analysis in Developer Tooling
On a recent project, I watched a team spend the better part of a week tracking down a single regression. The pipeline was a long-running simulation suite. Each…
- Atomic Spin
A Skeptic at AI Engineers’ World Fair
Whether you use or even like AI, the genie is out of the bottle. What used to feel like a more personalized Google search can now index your entire codebase…
- Atomic Spin
Build Alignment Using a Product Requirements Document
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…
- Atomic Spin
How I Build My Ubuntu 26.04 Cloud-Init Template for Proxmox
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…
- Atomic Spin
Solution-First UX Design: Using AI to Solve Problems
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…
- Atomic Spin
How I’m Going Analog at My Tech Job: My Favorite Offline Tools
With the rollout of Atomic Object’s agentic delivery model, keeping my thoughts straight has been more challenging than before. Though agentic delivery…