Articles by Grizzly Peak Software

Every developer I know has a folder on their hard drive that's basically a cemetery. Mine is called ~/projects/archive, and it contains the remains of at...

If you've spent any serious time building with Claude's API, you've noticed the pattern. Mornings on the West Coast? Snappy. Sub-two-second responses on...

I published a technical book about training large language models. Not a pamphlet — a real book with working code examples, architecture diagrams, and...

There's a narrative floating around tech Twitter that older engineers are going to get replaced by AI. That the twenty-three-year-old who grew up with...

When you live in a cabin in Caswell Lakes, Alaska, you learn quickly that the margin between "everything is fine" and "everything is a problem" is thinner...

Last October I got turned around on a ridge above the Little Susitna River. Not dangerously lost — I knew roughly where I was — but the game trail I'd...

I shipped twelve products last year. Not twelve ideas. Not twelve prototypes gathering dust on GitHub. Twelve things that real people could sign up for...

I live with bears. Not metaphorically. Not in the cute "I saw a bear once at a national park" sense. I mean I walk to my truck in the morning and check...

My cabin in Caswell Lakes, Alaska runs on solar panels and a battery bank. During the winter, when we get about five hours of usable daylight and...

I gave away the first three chapters of my book for free. People told me I was crazy.

Last January, it hit minus 38 in Caswell Lakes. Not wind chill — actual air temperature. At that point, the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius...

My cabin in Caswell Lakes runs on a solar panel array and a battery bank. In the summer, I have more power than I know what to do with — twenty hours of...

I lost power for three days last January.

It was negative thirty-eight outside and I had just written the most productive code of my entire year.

I broke three pieces of walnut last winter trying to build a bookshelf.

I almost killed myself with a roof beam.

I used to work seventy-hour weeks and convince myself it was ambition.

Here's a truth that most side hustle advice ignores: when you're over fifty, you don't have the same tolerance for busywork that you did at twenty-five.

My phone buzzed at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday. A Slack message from a client in London. "Quick question about the API integration — can you take a look?"

I turned 40 in 2014. Obama was in office, Docker was barely a year old, and I was deep into a career trajectory that I thought was going exactly where it...