Atomic operation is a single, indivisible unit of work that either completes entirely or not at all, with no intermediate state. It's like trying to update your Facebook relationship status to "It's complicated" while also changing your profile pic to a selfie with your ex - it either all works or it all fails, no half-measures.

How to use it in a sentence

• I told the new dev on our team that we needed to make sure the database updates were atomic operations, but he just gave me a blank stare and said "I thought we were using MongoDB, not Atom Editor". 🤦‍♂️

• When the CEO asked why the new feature was taking so long, I explained that we had to ensure all the atomic operations were properly synchronized, but he just nodded and said "Uh huh, sounds like quantum physics, let's circle back on that next sprint". 😒

If you actually want to learn more...

• Martin Fowler's article on the LMAX Architecture dives into how they achieve high performance through sequential, in-memory execution of tasks as atomic operations.

• The article on breaking a monolith into microservices emphasizes the importance of migrating in atomic, evolutionary steps to avoid failed legacy migration plans.

• This post on real-time full-text search with Luwak and Samza mentions how breaking down complex queries into smaller, atomic subqueries can optimize search performance.

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