Recent content in Home on The Grumpy Dev
Every piece of software comes with Terms and Conditions. Nobody reads them. They click Accept, install the software, and only discover six months later that it runs slower, costs more, and wants permission to everything. I sometimes think companies adopt microservices the same way. No one reads the terms People install software all the time, but almost nobody reads the Terms and Conditions. If one…
Bio I’m Mark, a software engineer who’s been building software professionally for more than two decades. I’ve worked everywhere from startups to large enterprises, shipping systems in finance, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing. This blog isn’t about chasing the latest framework or predicting that AI will replace programmers next Tuesday. It’s about the things that…
When we adopted Agile at MCA Solutions, management handed us what seemed like an impossible requirement: Every feature had to be developed and tested in the same sprint. At the time our sprints were three weeks long. Development alone could consume the entire sprint. QA often tested features weeks or even months later. The idea that testing would somehow happen alongside development felt detached…
One declaration to rule them all As a full-stack developer you work with a lot of data. Data that is stored, displayed, and processed in the bowels of your program. A lot of times there is a lot of repetition and repetition. The SQL CRUD, the UI CRUD. And when you are a junior programmer who is clever, you start thinking dangerous thoughts… premature abstraction thoughts… I am doing…
Bare metal I love food. There is something deeply human about sharing a meal, whether at home or in a restaurant. Some restaurants that I love have a view into their kitchen. Have you ever seen the kitchen at a good restaurant? One thing you may find surprising is how clean it is at all times. I mean I love to cook, but often after I am done cooking there is a mess to clean up. The restaurant…
Coding is expensive and time consuming We are living in an age of mass denial. Some very smart people are telling us that we no longer need to write good software because LLMs can generate code now. But terrible software is still terrible software, whether it was written by Claude Code or by a human who did not know what they were doing. The computers running it are still real. Latency is still…
Patio looks great At some point my friend re-did the patio at his suburban Bucks County home. He is a Russian American as well, and as part of our immigrant community everyone knows “a good guy”. You can always call someone who is only referred to by their first name. This person charges far less than a private licensed and insured contractor costs. When it was finished, the patio…
Who does square roots with a slide rule anymore? When I was a little kid in the USSR my grandpa showed me his slide rule. I loved playing with the scientific calculator and I knew what a square root was, but here was a device that grandpa used at work in the 1930s we were not sure if he was born in 1912 or 1914. But yeah the slide rule was the bees-knees or the top-pickle or whatever they said in…
The tale of the scheduled task that times out. Another day in paradise. We are directed to fix a prod issue that has been happening on and off for some time. The scheduled task is timing out. Again. We need to fix it.We already moved the job to the middle of the night so it could have the whole machine to itself. More memory. More CPU. Still timing out. Ugh this thing. Someone ought to rewrite it.…
Are we inside an AI bubble? TLDR; Every bubble claims the old rules no longer apply. Having lived through several bubbles in the tech industry I offer my perspective. The technology changes. Human incentives do not. My bubbles As someone who was born, as my kids tell me, in the last century I have had the personal pleasure of expereincing several bubbles first hand. I am not an economist but I can…