Recent content on Austin Atchley
If you visited my website, you probably saw the Aurora effect behind it: glowing bands of color that drift and blend like a CRT-suffused aurora borealis, with a halo chasing your cursor and a faint particle field that scatters as you move. What you can’t see from the outside is the process. I built the new UX over a few weeks of pair-programming with an AI coding agent. This is a series…
This is Part 2 of Agentic Engineering in Practice . Part 1 set up the architecture, the deploy pipeline, and the tooling. An agent can generate a lot of code very fast. While that sounds appealing, it’s also a problem in disguise. Nothing teaches a model about your machine’s render budget, and performance is critical when building something that uses animation on a web page since you…
This is Part 3 of Agentic Engineering in Practice . Part 2 covered the instrumentation that tells the agent where to spend its effort. Perf measurement answers where to change things. Tests answer a harder, sneakier question: after the change, is anything broken? When your collaborator regenerates whole files from scratch on every iteration, you need a safety net that catches behavior drift…
This is Part 4 of Agentic Engineering in Practice . Part 1 covered the setup and deploy loop, Part 2 the instrumentation and measurement, and Part 3 the testability. This one is the honest part: what it’s actually like to work this closely with an AI agent. The honest part: the agent is a co-engineer with three hard deficiencies, no eyes, no sustained taste, and no memory across sessions. No…
I’m excited to announce Echoes by n.ara , co-produced, mixed, and mastered by me. Go check it out! https://open.spotify.com/track/40UjFoY9mSvnwMGNN52jPL
I’m starting a new music review series on this blog, a running list of my favorite albums, the formative ones, the new things coming out, whatever I’m listening to at the moment. It’s a way to durably keep track of the ratings and write a little about each one and what it means to me. There’s no better place to start than this one, because this is where it all started:
I never used Twitter (I guess that’s the Zoomer side of the Zillenial in me), but since signing up for Bluesky, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the quality of content. Their starter pack feature makes it easier than ever to get high quality posts delivered straight to your news feed. Also their “domain name as handle” feature is pretty nifty for those of us who feel…
I am excited to announce that ARBORETUM, the second album under Post Bag Productions, is now streaming on all platforms! Go check it out! If you don’t have access to a streaming service, you can also listen to the full album on YouTube : This is a project I’ve been working on for the past year along with my creative partner, Sudarshan . We perserved through several cross-country moves…
I was first exposed to the ideas of the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan in a talk by Chris Cox (CPO of Meta) at the Menlo Park campus. McLuhan’s work centers around media studies, which is a sub-discipline of philosophy that isn’t often taught in introductory or intermediate philosophy courses. After digging deeper into the work of McLuhan alone, I felt that it was strange I had…
Introduction Over the past year, I have been diving deeper into Remix , a framework for building simpler websites based on web standards plus a pleasing UX, for my project message-in-a-bottle . Discovering the world of frontend programming has been quite interesting, and I’ve run into a few unexpected features in Remix worth sharing. Here, I’d like to do a short deep dive on the…
In a short gap between two jobs, I started working on a simple idea for a creative, multi-modal (text-to-text and text-to-image) AI-based web application. I had been tracking the open-source development of the Spring AI project , and thought it would be the perfect opportunity to evaluate the project for my idea. While life has gotten in the way of my finishing of the project so far (the frontend…
While recovering from my second bout of COVID, I have been looking back through the pictures I took on my around-the-world trip this summer ( which you can read more about here ). On the Europe leg of the trip, we were lucky enough to visit some of the best museums in the world, but we also found some inspiring art in unexpected places. Excluding famous works, here are some selected favorites:
After living in Seattle for the past 3 years, I moved to New York in August. For my first apartment, I found the Yorkville neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to be quite agreeable, and I’m currently working on my message-in-a-bottle fullstack web app project while getting settled. Central Park in the Fall Already, I’ve definitely enjoyed having full access to the subway…
Although I tend to prefer alternative methods of transport these days, there is something to be said for the joys of traversing the open roads of America in a personal automobile. Last week, I drove solo from Seattle, WA to Austin, TX over the course of four days. With most of my belongings in the trunk of my Challenger, I made the trip in anticipation of my move to New York City in September. As…
In 2019, I studied abroad for a semester at SciencesPo in Reims, France. During that year, I developed a deep appreciation for travel, and the ease of it all was a revelation to college me, who had never left the country before embarking on my 6 month adventure. It was bittersweet to return to the US, even if I was going back to Austin, one of my favorite cities in the world. I planned to return…
I’m using this page as a way to track a running list of tech blog posts that have caught my interest this year. This is primarily meant to be a living document for my own purposes, but it will also eventually serve as a historical record and a reference for visitors like you! 👋 Tech Industry “Let It Fail” https://www.maxcountryman.com/articles/let-it-fail When working in an…
Recently, I started using the Remix framework for my WIP project message-in-a-bottle . This has been an interesting experience, and I think this has been so especially because I wasn’t previously familiar with any current Javascript web development stacks (e.g. React, Angular, the recent proliferation of using Next.js, etc.). My experience with Remix is that it seems to work well “out…
Introduction Recently I have been teaching myself more about web development using static-site generation for this website, and Remix for my other main project . CSS has been one of the biggest learning curves, as I have thus far considered myself as primarily a backend engineer and never got around to learning the basics of the front-end world For this website, I use a modified version of…
Re-published from a 2019 Medium post If you were asked to envision an archaeologist, what would come to mind? Perhaps an Indiana Jones-esque figure, digging in dusty soil in search of a long lost treasure. Petra This is the romantic idea of archaeology fed by the media. However, today’s biggest challenge in archaeology is not to make new discoveries, but to work through the ever-increasing body of…
Re-published from a 2019 Medium post : “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” A mushroom cloud Since 1945, these words have haunted some, yet they have fallen on others’ deaf ears. When Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita, he had realized the impact of the greatest inventions in the history of the human race, one of his own creation: the atomic bomb. This advancement had come out of…
Re-published from a 2019 Medium post : Would you guarantee the happiness of a whole city in exchange for the misery of one poor soul? In Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” we reach this moral dilemma: is the intense suffering of one boy worth the happiness of a city? I would like to encourage any reader of this article to read Le Guin’s story first — it’s a…
Hello World! This is the first post on this website. It uses static pages generated by Hugo and hosted in S3. To reduce latency, it uses CloudFront in front of S3 as a CDN. There’s also a Lambda@Edge function that routes requests within the S3 bucket that contains all the static files. The site uses AWS Certificate Manager to manage its SSL/TLS certificate. I run deployments using…
👋 Welcome to my website I’m a software engineer and musician based in NYC. I enjoy building worlds with code and sound 💻 🎶 I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020, earning dual degrees from the computer science department and a liberal arts program called Plan II Honors . I wrote an undergraduate thesis analyzing the philosophical underpinnings of self-driving…
Music Projects I release music as os.10 , primarily under my project postbag alongside Sudarshan Iyengar , my friend and frequent collaborator. Here’s a running list of releases: MORPHIUS by postbag (single) 07/06/2023 CAPTAIN ALCHEMIST by postbag (single) 07/15/2023 DUSTY by postbag (album) 07/20/2023 11 days by postbag (single) 10/18/2024 sakal ban by postbag (single) 10/11/2024 ARBORETUM…