Articles by Grizzly Peak Software

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...

My first royalty check from Amazon was $47.32. That was for an entire quarter of sales of a technical book that took me the better part of eight months to...

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

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...

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

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

Most people hear "homesteading in Alaska" and picture some guy with an axe and a flannel shirt who has never touched a computer. And honestly, some days...

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.

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 month I ran a batch classification job through three different models: GPT-4o-mini, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Claude 3.5 Haiku. Same prompts, same data...

I used to spend two hours every morning reviewing pull requests. Coffee in hand, cabin quiet except for the woodstove popping, just grinding through diffs...

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 watched a site with 40,000 AI-generated pages lose 92% of its traffic in a single Google algorithm update. Forty thousand pages. Built over six months....

I was standing in my shop last November, staring at a piece of walnut I'd been saving for two years, trying to figure out how to turn a vague idea in my...

Last month, a developer I mentor showed me an architecture diagram that Claude had generated for his team's new microservices migration. It was beautiful....

I'll admit it — I have a model loyalty problem. For the past year, I've defaulted to Claude for nearly everything. Writing articles, debugging code...

Last Tuesday I was sitting in my cabin in Caswell Lakes, Alaska, watching a founder friend struggle over Zoom. He had a Rails app deployed on Heroku, a...

Last month I tried to feed an entire microservices architecture spec into GPT-4. The spec was about 38,000 tokens — not even that big by enterprise...