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thecodemonkey

1,174 karma · joined June 29, 2012

Co-Founder @ geocod.io

http://github.com/MiniCodemonkey bsky.app/profile/codemonkey.io

Interests: DevOps, Entrepreneurship, Hardware, Laravel, Remote Work

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thecodemonkey··on The Year of Internal Tools
I totally agree! I usually combine it with the ask user question tool in Claude Code which makes decision-making a breeze.
thecodemonkey··on Show HN: Vask – Pusher-compatible WebSockets on Cloudflare, no fan-out fees
Really love this approach. And I’m all in for making websockets cheaper and less painful.
thecodemonkey··on The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker
Fun! I was just reading about the star tracker in "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed". Really fascinating when you're thinking about how this all happened in the 50's and 60's.
thecodemonkey··on Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
Running the same codebase for 10+ years with a small team is what finally made me fully internalize these rules.

I've always been a KISS/DRY person but over a decade there are plenty of moments where you're tempted to reach for a fancier database or rewrite something in a trendier stack. What's actually kept things running well at scale is boring, known technologies and only optimizing in the places where it actually matters.

We wrote our principles down recently and it basically just reads like Pike's rules in different words: https://www.geocod.io/code-and-coordinates/2025-09-30-develo...

thecodemonkey··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
I'm working on Chief [1], a CLI that autonomously works through a PRD using AI coding agents like Claude Code.

You write user stories, start it up, and it loops through them one at a time. Fresh context per story, progress tracked in markdown between iterations. One clean commit per completed story. Has a TUI for watching it work and supports running multiple PRDs in parallel via git worktrees.

Built it because a lot of the "autonomous coding" tooling out there felt overly complex and opaque. Chief is intentionally lightweight and transparent. Everything is just markdown files and git. No magic.

[1] https://github.com/MiniCodeMonkey/chief

thecodemonkey··on A $1k AWS mistake
We are also 100% customer-funded. AWS makes sense for us for the enterprise version of Geocodio where we are SOC2 audited and HIPAA-compliant.

We are primarily using Hetzner for the self-serve version of Geocodio and have been a very happy customer for decades.

thecodemonkey··on A $1k AWS mistake
Hahaha. I'll update the post once I hear back from them. One could hope that they might consider an account credit.
thecodemonkey··on A $1k AWS mistake
That was truly my hope with this post! Glad to hear that
thecodemonkey··on A $1k AWS mistake
Haha, yep we were lucky to catch this early! It could easily have gotten lost with everything else in the monthly AWS bill.
thecodemonkey··on Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
There's a couple of great open source projects[1][2][3] that try to keep up-to-date lists of domains that belong to disposable email providers.

I would probably not recommend implementing a whitelist for blocking purposes. But perhaps domains on a whitelist could get a slight scoring bump.

[1] https://github.com/disposable-email-domains/disposable-email... [2] https://github.com/disposable/disposable [3] https://github.com/unkn0w/disposable-email-domain-list

thecodemonkey··on Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
Thanks for giving it a read!
thecodemonkey··on Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
We are mainly B2B so we don't really see signups using Apple's email relay. That said, it could be something we might have to consider blocking in the future if it becomes a problem.

For paying customers, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to use an anonymous email address, since we ask for your name and billing address either way (have to stay compliant with sales taxes!)

thecodemonkey··on Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
Isn't it nice to have just a little bit of an illustration instead of just text? Obviously an AI-generated image is going to spit out some nonsense text as part of the graphic, but we're not really trying to hide that it's AI generated.
thecodemonkey··on Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
I would love do a more in-depth talk about this at some point with some more concrete examples.
thecodemonkey··on Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
Not at this time. Some simple heuristics go a long way and also makes it very easy to test and debug the logic.
thecodemonkey··on Laravel Cloud
Really excited for this! Had the opportunity to take part in early access over the last few weeks and the deployment process has been super smooth and insanely fast.

I'm mostly just impressed with how polished everything feels and how easy it was to add database, key/value store, etc.

Currently using Laravel Vapor for most of my hosting needs, but will be switching everything over to Cloud.

thecodemonkey··on Using uv as your shebang line
What is uv?
thecodemonkey··on Geocodio keeps 300M addresses up to date
Our timezone and Highway data is OSM-based, but that's pretty much it.

Many of our address sources come from the OpenAddresses project: https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses

thecodemonkey··on Show HN: Launch a static website in under 30 seconds
Oh wow. This reminds me of Netlify pre-funding. All the at down to the <input type=“file” /> on the landing page
thecodemonkey··on Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke
The Danish defense forces now confirms their presence but they are not providing any other information right now: https://x.com/forsvaretdk/status/1859195509866381402

(This is also a rare English-language tweet from an account that usually only tweets in Danish)

thecodemonkey··on Hacking millions of modems and investigating who hacked my modem
It's easy to hate on big companies. But can we just applaud Cox for having patched this within a day? That's incredible.
thecodemonkey··on Cloudflare Announces Firewall for AI
Are they using AI to filter the requests? That would be a match made in heaven!
thecodemonkey··on My sign up form was abused to send spam. Is yours safe?
The issue is also that most email clients will automatically convert URL's to links in HTML emails. So if an URL is put in e.g. your name field, it will still be clickable despite of no <a> tags.
thecodemonkey··on Ask HN: What would be your stack if you are building an MVP today?
I would pick whichever stack that I would be most productive in.

A Laravel app hosted with Laravel Vapor (AWS Lambda) with a MariaDB database. Would allow me to get up and running quickly, at low cost and without having to worry about scaling for a long time.

Using Tailwind and VueJS or AlpineJS for the frontend.

thecodemonkey··on Don't force users to register before they can buy (2015)
While not strictly e-commerce. This was an important design choice when we designed our spreadsheet upload tool for Geocodio.

It should be possible to go through as much of the process as possible without having to sign up first.

It certainly makes it technically more difficult to develop, but it's incredibly powerful and user friendly.

thecodemonkey··on Ntfy.sh – Send push notifications to your phone via PUT/POST
Neat! I built something similar a while ago, to scratch my own itch. It's just using text messages instead of a dedicated app (for good or for worse).

It's funny how similar the domain name is.

https://nudge.sh https://github.com/geocodio/nudge.sh

thecodemonkey··on Ask HN: What's your no-cloud infra look like?
We got ~175 bare metal dedicated servers for maximum performance within our infrastructure.

We also have a separate instance of our SaaS running on AWS in the “cloud” for security and compliance reasons.

thecodemonkey··on Ask HN: Best self-hosted CI solution?
I'm a huge fan of Drone CI. Loads of customization options, and a simple, powerful UI. Easy to self-host and scale as docker containers.

https://www.drone.io

thecodemonkey··on Tosh: Changing your SSH server's listen address every 30 seconds based on TOTP
That’s a super cool concept, but doesn’t this fall a bit under “security by obscurity”?
thecodemonkey··on What’s your API’s “Time To 200”?
We're doing something similar, requiring email verification in certain cases based on past traffic, ip address source, etc. Unfortunately, we had to straight up block known temporary email addresses because there was too much abuse.
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