Top all-time · #3270
Pete Keen
Personal blog · petekeen.net · on HN as zrailprogrammingbusiness
Pete Keen's personal blog at petekeen.net covers programming and business. Since 2013, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 141 times, most often “Mastering Modern Payments Using Stripe with Rails”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Pete Keen's blog for writing on Stripe and payments, PCI compliance, and archiving websites with wget. He also wrote the book Mastering Modern Payments, on Stripe and Rails.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Pete Keen's essays and projects.
Most-linked posts?
- Mastering Modern Payments Using Stripe with Rails3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-07-21
- The Life of a Stripe Charge3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-01-20
- /mastering-modern-payments2 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2013-08-02
- Adventures in Self Publishing2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-09-03
- Command Line Faxing2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-08-04
- Little Data: How do we query personal data?2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-11-12
- Program Your Finances: Command-Line Accounting2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-21
- DNS: Basic Concepts (2013)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-08
- The Box2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-12-02
- Your DNS Provider Should Not Be Your Registrar (2014)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-12-02
What Hacker News says?
Yes, I ended a paid plan and I'm in the process of moving completely to my own hosting for most of my personal projects. I wrote up a little blog post about it here: https://www.petekeen.net/self-hosted-git-server
Comment linking /self-hosted-git-server
on “Follow up to the investigation results”Submitted DNS: Basic Concepts (2013) as a story · 162 points
HN discussionI wrote an article[1] all about it a few months after I originally launched. There was some HN discussion about it too[2]. [1]: https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6320333
Comment linking /adventures-in-self-publishing
on “Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?”Submitted Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product as a story · 141 points
HN discussionKeeping read-only archives of the retired bug tracker seems like the right thing to do - even if that had to be done with an external archiving tool (top hit on google: https://www.petekeen.net/archiving-websites-with-wget )
Comment linking /archiving-websites-with-wget
on “Ask HN: Good ways to capture institutional knowledge?”Submitted My Own Private CDN as a story · 123 points
HN discussionI wrote a guide to integrating Stripe payments into Rails applications that expands greatly upon the 10-minute quick-starts[1]. It launched a little over a month ago and has generated more than $10k. I'm expecting that to drop quite a bit going forward but I'm still hoping for ~$500 in monthly revenue. [1]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments
Comment linking /mastering-modern-payments
on “Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?”Submitted DNS: The Good Parts as a story · 123 points
HN discussionI use a combination of Sparkleshare, Emacs, Markdown, and an emacs mode named Deft to accomplish this. Deft autosaves my notes as I write them, and then Sparkleshare automatically syncs changes with the git server. It's pretty nifty. https://www.petekeen.net/git-backed-personal-markdown-wiki (I added Deft later)
Comment linking /git-backed-personal-markdown-wiki
on “Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices”Submitted Know How To Roll Your SSL Certificates as a story · 120 points
HN discussionMy book "Mastering Modern Payments: Using Stripe with Rails" continues to sell well, in the $2k range per month. It's not exactly passive, though, as I write blog posts and develop other related content in the same theme. https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments
Comment linking /mastering-modern-payments
on “Your best passive income? (2014)”Submitted Self-hosted Git Server as a story · 115 points
HN discussionFor any Ruby on Rails developers in the UK who may now be jumping into Stripe for the first time because of this, Pete Keen has just released (or is releasing today) a new book called Mastering Modern Payments ( http://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments ) which focus on Stripe and Rails.
Comment linking /mastering-modern-payments
on “Introducing Stripe UK”Submitted Notes on Shutting Down an S-Corp as a story · 108 points
HN discussionI wrote a book[1] that generates about $2k of revenue per month. Not quite your definition of success, but it's given me a taste. I'm now in the beta testing process for my next thing[2]. [1]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments [2]: http://www.pagesnap.io
Comment linking /mastering-modern-payments
on “Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?”Submitted Payola – A Rails engine for Stripe as a story · 104 points
HN discussion> a few months a year of writing base hits This is going to be my plan for the next few years, assuming my first book[1] does well. It drops in 13 days! [1]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments
Comment linking /mastering-modern-payments
on “Two Stories of Passive Income Excess”Submitted Adventures in Self Publishing as a story · 104 points
HN discussionI've been using Ledger for almost nine years, both for my personal accounts and now my business accounts. I wrote some introductory articles about it, and further articles about how I use it day-to-day: https://www.petekeen.net/finance
Comment linking /finance
on “Ledger, a command-line accounting system”Submitted Program Your Finances: Command-Line Accounting as a story · 93 points
HN discussionI wrote and self-publish a book named Mastering Modern Payments[1], with a fairly recent second edition. It's making about $2k/mo. I am also selling paid support and add ons for my open-source Rails engine for Stripe named Payola[2][3], which very recently gained support for subscriptions[4]. [1]: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com [2]: https://www.payola.io [3]: https://www.payola.io/pro [4]: https://www.petek…
Comment linking /payola-subscriptions
on “Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate and from what?”Submitted Why your SaaS application should support SAML as a story · 85 points
HN discussionI used to do this as well, with tinydns. I even wrote an article with a similar name[1]. Then I wrote another article with a similar name[2] when I decided that I was being silly. I use Route53 now with a little cron that periodically updates the record that points at my home IP[3]. Route53 is bulletproof in a way that I'm unable to accomplish on my own. edit: Route53 is not actually cheaper than this person's setup…
Comment linking /how-and-why-im-not-running-my-own-dns
on “How and why I run my own DNS servers”Submitted Simple Git-backed Microsites as a story · 81 points
HN discussionI am simply pointing out that unlike what is covered in the Stripe documentation, a merchant is not absolved of PCI compliance by simply implementing Stripe.js in their HTTP response & turning on SSL/TLS. The PCI DSS and related materials cover this fact quite well. This "dispute" if you could even call it that came about when Pete Keen inadvertently also over simplified the compliance issue in one of his posts, for…
Comment linking /life-of-a-stripe-charge
on “Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club”Submitted Simulating a Market in Ruby as a story · 79 points
HN discussionThis is a great illustration of the power that APIs like Stripe's give a developer. That said, there are a few things that would make this integration more bulletproof. In particular, interactions with external services like Stripe and email should be handled in a background thread. That way you don't have to worry about transient API or SMTP server failures giving your customers a bad experience. The best bet for P…
Comment linking /mastering-modern-payments
on “Python and Flask Are Powerful”Submitted Essential Tools for Starting a Rails App in 2013 as a story · 69 points
HN discussionNot going to claim to be an expert, but if you struggle with the nuts and bolts of personal finances (ex: bounced rent checks even though you're a highly paid software developer) you might be interested in my radically simplified and fully automated system: https://www.petekeen.net/automatic-finances I've been using it for about three years now and, modulo a couple tweaks, it's substantially identical to that write…
Comment linking /automatic-finances
on “Personal finance experts don’t get wealthy by following their own advice”Submitted Little Data: How do we query personal data? as a story · 68 points
HN discussion
