About Me
I’m Anthony Grace, an Irish expat who has called the United States home since 2001.
I’ve worn a few different hats over the years — from running a truck dealership to playing professional blues guitar. I don’t play gigs anymore, but I still buy guitars I probably don’t need, so apparently some habits survive career changes.
My software career began in 2003 with ASP.NET, and I’ve been building software in the Microsoft ecosystem ever since. These days my interests are primarily backend development, APIs, data, architecture, modernization, and the kind of production problems that rarely fit neatly into a tutorial.
After more than two decades in software, I’ve become increasingly interested in something beyond the code itself: what experience actually means in this profession.
A senior developer’s value is difficult to reduce to a technology list. It lives in the systems they have built, the failures they have diagnosed, the production environments they have supported, the migrations they have survived, the architectural decisions they have made, and the judgment accumulated from seeing what works — and what eventually blows up.
That question became particularly interesting as AI began changing software development.
AI can now produce code remarkably quickly. What it cannot manufacture quite so easily is years of context, engineering judgment, production ownership, business knowledge, or the instinct that tells an experienced developer that something which looks perfectly reasonable is about to cause trouble six months from now.
That thinking eventually led me to create SageLinked.
SageLinked is an early-stage technical hiring platform built around a simple idea:
A developer’s career is bigger than a conventional resume.
The project is developing the SLXR — SageLinked eXplainable Resume — a developer-reviewed representation of what someone has actually built, fixed, modernized, supported, and owned.
I write about that journey here, but this isn’t a corporate SageLinked blog.
You’ll also find plenty about software engineering, .NET, Artificial Intelligence, hiring, technology, working remotely, career longevity, and whatever else I happen to find interesting enough to have an opinion about.
Long before this site, I ran a programming blog called CodersBarn, which at its peak attracted around 10,000 unique visitors a month. Eventually life got busy and writing took a back seat. I’m enjoying getting back to it.
After spells in Northern California and Colorado, I now live in Wyoming with my family.
And yes, there will probably still be the occasional guitar post.
Anthony Grace
Founder, SageLinked
Software developer
Occasional blues guitarist
Professional purchaser of unnecessary Les Pauls