Articles by Grizzly Peak Software

I turned 52 this year. I've been writing code professionally since I was 19. That's 33 years of shipping software, watching paradigms come and go, and...

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've been lifting weights for almost 30 years. Not competitively — just consistently. Three to four days a week, every week, through career changes...

Last January, the temperature at my cabin in Caswell Lakes hit negative 42 degrees Fahrenheit. The diesel generator ran nonstop. My Starlink dish had so...

Let me tell you what nobody at those "passive income" conferences wants to admit: most side projects don't make money. They make traffic. They make GitHub...

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...

I got tired of the same deployment ritual. Create a new Vercel project. Connect the GitHub repo. Set up environment variables. Spin up a new Supabase...

I've had pages deindexed. I've had AdSense applications rejected. I've watched a site go from 8,000 indexed pages to 4,000 in a single week — and then...

Six months ago, I couldn't write a single line of code without feeling like the walls were closing in. I'd sit down at my desk, open my editor, stare at...

I've been living on a homestead in Caswell Lakes, Alaska for a while now. And every single day, I run into problems that software should be solving but...

Every Sunday morning, before I do anything else, I sit down at my desk with a cup of black coffee and open the same five browser tabs I've opened every...

Last month I was looking at my analytics for AutoDetective.ai and noticed something I wasn't expecting. A non-trivial chunk of referral traffic was coming...

The idea of building something functional in 24 hours is intoxicating. Hackathons. Indie hacker challenges. "I built a SaaS in a weekend" Twitter threads....

I sold my first digital product on Gumroad in 2023. It was a PDF about API gateway patterns, the cover looked like it was designed in PowerPoint by...

Last February, in the dead of an Alaskan winter, my battery bank voltage dropped to 11.2V at 3 AM. The inverter alarm woke me up. It was -28°F outside...

Every few months, someone on Hacker News posts about their Kubernetes cluster running a personal blog and three microservices. Twenty nodes. Service mesh....

I wrote 200 lines of code this morning before the sun came up. Then I went outside and split a cord of birch in minus fifteen degrees. Then I came back...

Everybody wants to talk about growth hacking. Nobody wants to talk about what happens when you have literally zero dollars to spend on it.

In January 2025, AutoDetective.ai had about 800 indexed pages. By March 2026, it has over 20,000. The traffic graph looks like a hockey stick that...

The first dollar you make online feels different from every dollar after it.