Atomic

Atomic builds companies, and new ideas start with a rapid prototype. During my four month internship, I helped build 7 prototypes.

What is Atomic?

Atomic is not a venture capital firm like Sequoia, or an incubator like Y Combinator.

New ideas are given to experienced entrepreneur Founder-in-Residences who vet them with potential customers and conduct market research. They then pitch the Atomic partners, and if approved, get initial funding to build a minimum viable product (MVP).

Once a prototype is out with initial users, customer acquisition and usage metrics from the MVP determine whether further funding is given to the idea.

I worked as a Full Stack Developer intern on Atomic's Rapid Prototyping Team and helped build 7 different MVPs in four months.

Through many varying industries and tech stacks, I gained a strong understanding of:

• Model View Controller (MVC) frameworks
• Full stack development (front end, back end, API, and databases)
• Web and iOS platforms

What prototypes did I work on?

Web: Stealth Social

• Skill(HTML)/CSS
• ReactJS/Redux
• Django/Python3
• Neo4j graph database
• AWS
• Skill(Docker)

I built front end ReactJS components and a Django API endpoint for uploading files to Amazon S3.

Web: Bungalow

• Skill(Google-Maps-API)
• Skill(Material-Design)
• Skill(HTML)/CSS
• Javascript

For portfolio company, Bungalow, I built a custom Squarespace maps and listings page for their apartment properties. Read more here.

Web: Internal Platform

• ReactJS/Redux
• Koa.js
• PostgreSQL
• Skill(HTML)/CSS
• Javascript

Worked with colleague to build a platform that includes a Reddit style internal forum, people directory, and Wiki for core Atomic documents.

I built user profile pages with ReactJS components, added editing functionality to the Wiki section, and a caching layer with browser localstorage for static data including the employee directory.

Slackbot: Internal Platform Search

• Slackbot
• Ruby on Rails
• Discourse

Forked Discourse Slackbot to add search functionality with /discourse search {query}. Also improved return message formatting to calculate reading time, link to post, author, and categories. Submitted pull request for merge into the open source repo.

Hardware: Stealth Medical

• Node.js
• Koa.js (ExpressJS successor)
• PostgreSQL
• Raspberry Pi
• AWS
• Skill(Docker)

Built from scratch backend server and RESTful API for stealth medical hardware project. This included planning database schema, building all initial RESTful endpoints, and JWT token authentication service.

I also wrote an async endpoint to process multipart file uploads, compare checksums of the uploaded file against request metadata, and asynchronously upload files to Amazon S3.

iOS: Stealth Email

• iOS
• Swift3
• Objective-C
• Mailcore
• Audio Waveforms

Worked on UI views and audio waveform animations for a stealth email app. Specifically worked on different methods to maintain similar sized real time waveform animations even with quiet input audio levels.

iOS: Stealth Social

• iOS
• Swift3
• Core Bluetooth
• Audio Waveforms

Built asynchronous onboarding flow in stealth file sharing app. Primary focus was on optimizing the user flow for Bluetooth pairing when partner device is not present. Used Core Bluetooth library to change UI based on partner discovery and connection status.

Closing Thoughts

I'm very thankful for the experience I got at Atomic. I've never learned so many practical dev skills in a short period of time from such collaborative and supportive colleagues.

What I learned at Atomic has give me the skills to tackle more side projects and just in the past 3 months I have:

• Docker-ized my blog
• Wrote custom build scripts and Docker images for my Operating Systems class at UWaterloo
• And built an Ansible provisioning playbook for my personal dev environments