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developerWithACat
Personal blog · developerwithacat.com/blog · on HN as mmarianstartupsprogrammingcareer
developerWithACat is a personal blog at developerwithacat.com about startups, programming and career. Since 2025, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 57 times, most often “A free solution to the GitHub Actions supply chain crisis”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-14, and you can follow it by feed.
A generalist software engineer's blog on random startup, business, and tech topics.
Most-linked posts?
- A free solution to the GitHub Actions supply chain crisis2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-04-24
- I chose CSV uploads over complex UI for my MVP, and I'm proud2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-28
What Hacker News says?
Just writing posts for my blog on personal experiences with startups https://developerwithacat.com . Am taking a break from any serious building, bit tired of failing. Using the blog as a form of self therapy.
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)”Submitted I chose CSV uploads over complex UI for my MVP, and I'm proud as a story · 13 points
HN discussionJust writing blog posts on all my startup failures: https://developerwithacat.com
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on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)”Submitted Commit hash pinning in GitHub Actions: secure, but at a cost as a story · 5 points
HN discussionJust writing about learnings from failed startup attempts: https://developerwithacat.com Might start doing a few posts on Cloudflare WAF as I've been working with it extensively lately. Maybe it'll help me uncover some startup ideas in that space.
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on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)”Submitted Hey potential cofounder, I won't sign your NDA as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYep, I've done that a few times, eg https://developerwithacat.com/blog/052025/postmortem-company... Quite cathartic. And I occasionally share it in some conversations to avoid repeating the story.
Comment linking /blog/052025/postmortem-company-database/
on “It's OK to abandon your side-project”Submitted Should I launch a form limiter app on the Google Workspace Marketplace? (2025) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> the key is to POSSE. I do that by sharing my content here, on Reddit, and LinkedIn. And it works! I just wrote a blog post about it in case anyone's interested: https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/blog-engagement-ti...
Comment linking /blog/202507/blog-engagement-tips
on “Ask HN: How to find non-popular blogs and forums?”Submitted My experience going through a startup incubator (2025) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGreat guide! A few things I'd add, after starting my own blog https://developerwithacat.com in Feb: - it's okay if you don't follow all of the advice; just do whatever you feel like doing, otherwise you'll make it a chore and you won't end up publishing - Reddit's a great place to have conversations, but be prepared for many negative ones - if you want to have readers, you need to account for the time you spend shar…
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on “Why and how to write things on the Internet (2022)”Submitted Trying to get Claude to help me buy a car as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've written a post on why I don't think it'll succeed: https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per...
Comment linking /blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per-crawl/
on “How I protect my Forgejo instance from AI web crawlers”Submitted Postmortem for my UK company database startup (2025) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWrote a blog post on why I don't think it'll be adopted: https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per... tldr - motivated scrapers can pass Cloudflare, content owners won't be happy with the market price, and enterprise licensing agreements already fill whatever gaps there are
Comment linking /blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per-crawl/
on “Pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers”Submitted Can Cloudflare's AI pay per crawl succeed? I doubt it as a story · 2 points
HN discussion- Sharing my latest blog post on various socials to gather feedback - it's about the problems with pinning GitHub Actions by commit hashes: https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202508/github-actions-com... - Casually investigating a construction tech startup idea with an architect - thinking of what to do long term. Feeling pretty lost at the moment.
Comment linking /blog/202508/github-actions-commit-hash-pinning-tradeoffs/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2025)?”Submitted Is it worth launching a form limiter app on the Google Workspace Marketplace? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAlways because of insufficient validation before development. Wrote about a couple I failed with here: - https://developerwithacat.com/blog/052025/postmortem-company... - https://developerwithacat.com/blog/052025/postmortem-tiktok-...
Comment linking /blog/052025/postmortem-tiktok-trends
on “Ask HN: What was your failed startup and why did it fail?”Submitted Postmortem for my UK company database startup as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI recently started https://developerwithacat.com . Don't tend to read blogs myself though - hypocritical, I know. But it's just that I like learning about things that help me become more successful with my business projects - eg tips to get more traction, exploring problem domains. And I haven't found anyone who does that. There's X/Indie Hackers, but it's quite shallow, so I gave up on that too. I'm thinking of sta…
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on “Ask HN: Do you have a blog you own or follow?”Submitted I chose CSV uploads over complex UI for my MVP as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://developerwithacat.com/ I mostly talk about my learnings trying to launch startups.
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on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog?”Submitted My case against running containers in tests as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHe's promoting pay per crawl again. Wrote a blog post last year on why I don't see it working https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per...
Comment linking /blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per-crawl/
on “Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows”Submitted Should you join the Antler startup incubator program? It depends (2025) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI miss Jenkins too. A lot more flexible compared to GitHub Actions. Also addresses the supply chain attack vector we've seeing recently, by design. You don't pull external dependencies on every CI/CD invocation; they're installed once, on the server. Realised this when I was writing my post on what you have to do to replicate this in a makeshift way in GitHub Actions: https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202604/github…
Comment linking /blog/202604/github-actions-supply-chain-commit/
on “I Still Like Jenkins”Submitted 3k users, 0 revenue: a Google Sheets add-on postmortem as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOn a separate thread - want to say that I don't think pay-per-crawl (a la Cloudflare) is a viable model. I think a better approach is to go via the usual licensing contracts. See my blog post: https://developerwithacat.com/blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per... and an example with OpenAI / Reddit: https://openai.com/index/openai-and-reddit-partnership/
Comment linking /blog/202507/cloudflare-pay-per-crawl/
on “UK media groups unite to tackle AI 'scraping' of journalism”Submitted Searching for startup ideas on the Google Workspace Marketplace, pt 2 (2025) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion