Coding with Lewis

Atom was a revolutionary open-source code editor built on web technologies that pioneered the Electron framework. Created by GitHub's Chris Wanstrath in 2015, Atom democratized code editor customization using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, Electron's architecture caused performance issues. Microsoft leveraged the same Electron framework to build Visual Studio Code, which proved significantly faster through better optimization. After Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018, Atom development stalled despite promises of continued support. The editor was officially sunset in 2022, but its legacy lives on—Electron now powers billions of daily interactions in applications like Slack, Discord, and VS Code itself.

Atom: The Editor That Accidentally Built Its Own Killer

Shopify nearly incurred $1 million in monthly BigQuery costs due to inefficient queries scanning 75 GB per request. By implementing database clustering to organize data by date, geography, and timestamp, they reduced query size to 508 MB, cutting costs to under $1,400 monthly. The case demonstrates how proper data warehouse optimization and partitioning strategies can prevent massive cloud infrastructure expenses.

Best of Coding with Lewis — December 2025