I’ve made many mistakes in my career. There are times I’ve made the wrong call, said the wrong thing, or fumbled an important detail. I’d wager any successful person can say the same. It’s tempting to dwell on a mistake, but focusing on what you do after is a more valuable use of your time. […]

“Because we’ve always done it this way” is an answer that always needs investigating. There is a classic tale about this: A newlywed couple is settling into married life when one partner notices that the other always cut the ends off large pieces of meat before putting them in the oven. They ask, “Why?” and […]

I turned forty in September. Including internships, I’ve been working professionally for over twenty years. The time has gone really fast. I’ve done some reflecting recently on what I’ve learned over the last two decades. I hope that these three simple lessons will resonate with you. Lesson 1 – Find Your Own Path Early in […]

One of the tools that I’ve added to my development and writing workflows since starting at Atomic is mind mapping software. I’ve found that creating a mind map is a great starting point for both technical development and writing things like blog posts. There are lots of different mind mapping apps, spanning all different computing […]

Recently, I received a very insightful question from an applicant to Atomic Object. They were considering an internship and were wondering if a small company would have as many networking opportunities as a larger enterprise-size company. I think this is a great question, especially for an internship, when the focus should be on building relationships […]

Finding palatable learning material can be difficult. Especially in the tech industry, it might feel like the only decent learning materials are hundred-slide lectures, verbose Wikipedia articles, and Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition. But I’ve recently found an unexpected source for some creative and engaging methods of communicating technical concepts — Twitter. I discovered that […]

It’s hard to believe that I’m almost through my twenties. It doesn’t seem like too long ago when I was balancing a school workload with my fun, new internship at Atomic. My crowning achievement as an intern was adding some code to our homegrown CI monitor to pull builds from TeamCity CI. Since I’m entering […]

Everybody needs an occasional vacation — time set aside to relax, recharge, get inspired, expand your horizons, etc. You don’t need to travel far to get these things, but it certainly helps to move yourself out of familiar territory. As a programmer, it’s also important to occasionally get away from the codebases you use on […]

Atomic makers work in teams, and our developers pair program quite a bit. I’ve come to understand the value of pair programming as a teaching and learning activity since joining Atomic. But recently, I’ve realized a new benefit of pairing: staying focused and motivated. For the last two weeks, I’ve been working solo to wrap […]