The five-minute app
Why building small personal tools is the best way to stay sharp, and why AI makes it a practice anyone can adopt
Mike Grouchy
Mike Grouchy's blog about software development, product, and leadership
Latest posts
AI Enabled Software Development and Jevons Paradox
AI reduces the cost of building software. History says that means we'll build more of it, not less.
Taste is the new Meta
Everyone says taste is the new differentiator. They're half right.
AI and the cost of experimentation
How AI collapses the cost of trying things, for developers and everyone else
How do junior developers grow in an AI world?
The skills that make a great developer haven't changed. The path to building them has. Nobody has figured out the new path yet.
I built my kid a French dictée app in 5 minutes
How a living room frustration became a working desktop app before bedtime
Hoopsmachine is in beta
Hoopsmachine is live in beta. Come check it out and tell me what's broken.
Be Pythonic: __init__.py
Modern guidance on __init__.py, namespace packages, and clean exports
AI and CEOing in 2026
How AI pulled me back toward building while keeping me focused on the work only a CEO can do
Hoopsmachine: A 14-Year Journey to Build the Basketball News Experience I Always Wanted
After 14 years of false starts, I'm finally shipping the basketball news aggregator I've always wanted to build.
Giving a shit
The underrated career superpower
Yes, your code does need comments
Why code comments are essential for capturing intent
Using Johnny Cache with Heroku and Memcachier
How to create a custom backend to make Johnny Cache work with Memcachier on Heroku
Write less code.
Your job isn't to write code. It's to solve problems with as little code as possible
Introducing Pycoder's Weekly
Announcing the launch of Pycoder's Weekly, a curated Python newsletter
Zsh is your friend
Why you should consider switching from Bash to Zsh