iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

httparty 0.24.3 is out. JSON 3 support, BOM fixes, fewer allocations. Party on. 🎉

John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 29/09/2026

Box Out and Fireside were both ~100k LOC (Ruby, JS, Html) a year ago. Both are ~250k as of today. Both are around a decade old. That means 150% increase in one year compared to previous decade. LOC is more interesting than useful but its still insane to see.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 29/09/2026

Open source these days: I'll have my agent talk to your agent. 😂

Chat conversation between Tony Dewan and John Nunemaker discussing robots, with messages about GitHub pull request and automated bot responses.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 29/09/2026

Can you imagine what Steve Jobs would be building right now if he had, fable, opus or sol?

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 29/09/2026

fun prompt: how many lines of code did we have in this app august last year vs today? feel free to adjust the list of apps or the date. Shows you the AI boom. Fireside and Box Out are lit!

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 28/09/2026

Used the @planetscale mcp to drop from 100% cpu to 85% in two 1 line PRs. Just some real obvious low hanging fruit.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 26/09/2026

Wow! One shot claude demo. Prompt: make a dynamic 15 second motion graphics video that shows what an incredible tool flipper is. Could it be improved? Sure, but honestly its stupid good for < 100 character prompt.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 26/09/2026

Great talk by Vladimir Dementyev on jobs. Didn't watch, just went through the slides but loved it. speakerdeck.com/palkan/rails-world-…

Technical conference slide about Rails workflow orchestration featuring speaker name Vladimir Dementyev and Evil Martians company with neon graphics.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 26/09/2026

What is the deal with everyone's bots. This is a brand new project (a few weeks ago) and they've literally crawled the whole thing and cost me > $100 in compute/memory in a few weeks. I want to allow searches but this feels like training data...

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 25/09/2026

After three days of cyber cabs in Austin, driving feels gross. 😆

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 21/09/2026

Thanks to my daily Codex/Flare app perf report I'm fixing some stuff on Fireside. Saw slowness. Kicked off a new task. Codex whipped together a 5 phase attack. Been deploying one at a time. Biggest improvement came from a couple line change of when we return 304 not modified. Avoids several queries.

Graph displaying system performance metrics over time, highlighting key values at 4 PM.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 17/09/2026

Starting to really take advantage of scheduled tasks in Codex. My App Performance one is really paying off. So I added more things to it (from railway and aws). Yesterday I created an OSS maintainer task to help me not let issues/pull requests slip by. Thinking Stripe is next.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 16/09/2026

A customer asked for a better way to use Flipper Cloud with preview apps, so we built it. Create a preview environment through the API, get a token scoped to it, and delete it when the deployment is gone. www.flippercloud.io/docs/cloud/api#…

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 16/09/2026

Day 3 of Codex as my PM. Ridiculous, but it's great having it tell me what to do. No real job since 2019, so its always been me figuring out what to do.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 15/09/2026

Call me crazy but I'm pretty sure Codex is now syncing pins. Also, I can reorder pins now. Such a little thing but amazing for keeping things organized.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 14/09/2026

All done. Took about ~30 minutes as expected. To do this with no read downtime has been a summer long project. Lots of poking and running it through different AI models to get it rock solid. 😮‍💨

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 14/09/2026

Massive db migration underway. Codex driving. PG 9.5 to 18. Self-hosted to Linode managed. Opted to do more work to keep the app in read only mode during the migration to avoid any downtime for customers even though the migration should be only 10-15 minutes.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 14/09/2026

I will say this... Codex noticed Caddy nearly ran out of memory, investigated the traffic, and found bots hitting IPs customers never use. It suggested blocking those IPs, tested the change through a live failover, applied it without downtime, documented it, and merged the PR. Pretty neat. 😊

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 14/09/2026

I had an absolute great month and a half with codex, but since the overwhelm with the astra release, even sol has occasionally went stupid on me. It feels like sol and astra both got nerfed to help capacity or something. Starting to consider trying fable 5.1...

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 14/09/2026

Current status: wrote down everything on my plate. Took pictures and uploaded to codex. Brain dumped thoughts on the list and context of each company/app. Told it to look for tasks to figure out how "close" things started are to being finished. Now its helping me prioritize the next few months.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 11/09/2026

Astra is really quick and accurate. I've been doing astra light the past day or so and its great. I will say it'll still do stuff that I wouldn't. For anything beyond a hacky side project I still review code and find crazy stuff. Lol.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 10/09/2026

Codex is saving me more money. 🤑 Last week it found years of pending uploads we weren't clearing. Saved $2k/mo. Yesterday it found $1k+/mo in S3 transfer to imgproxy. Moving it from Railway to Fargate makes transfer free. Almost another $1k/mo saved. 😂

Cutover report showing successful deployment with no downtime for AWS services.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 09/09/2026

I'm loving having codex run local simulations to harden (and improve) flipper. Been working on in memory reads off and on and I have a whole harness together now to run flipper gem against local flipper cloud instance and verify the resiliency under failures. Dramatically increases confidence.

Developer chat discussing code push, simulation testing, and database recovery steps for local Cloud environment during outage scenario.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 06/09/2026

Another great reason to have a read replica AI can query is you can make informed data-driven decisions. And then share with the team via github issue comment or whatever. This image is an example of analyzing image upload dimensions to optimize for rendering.

Text-heavy image discussing production image size research and statistics.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 05/09/2026

Astra is the first model I've hit my limit with. Time for baby's first reset. 🤣

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 04/09/2026

gstack's global retro is pretty neat. I had built a dev-log CLI to do this before, but I think I can retire it. The only other thing it adds is pulling in todoist stuff. Every day in the past week I touched 4-9 repos. Haha. "The biggest pattern is context switching."

Weekly developer activity report for John Nunemaker showing 211 commits across 11 projects and 447 AI coding sessions from Aug 28 to Sep 4.

Table showing repository commit data with dates and counts from August 28 to September 4.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 04/09/2026

You don't have to give coherent, fancy prompts. You can just gibberish the main idea and codex will figure it out. This one goes through individual requests that timed out, categorizes them and investigates fixes. PRs coming next. Flare already paying dividends!

Text discussing timeouts and performance issues in a web application.

Data table showing four performance problem families with notice counts, share percentages, and interpretations of issues found in software testing.

Screenshot of technical documentation discussing Flare/AppSignal and Heroku session authentication and correlation setup.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 04/09/2026

PodscanFM has a neat stats page now. Can't remember last time I was on the site, but I'm a sucker for stats.

Ranking chart showing top podcast categories and languages with counts and active statistics.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 03/09/2026

I used codex to clean up my mac disk the other day. Went from 50GB free (was completely unaware I was that close) to now 1.2TB free in sub 10 minutes.

Screenshot of data management recommendations on a Mac, showing storage usage and file cleanup suggestions.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 02/09/2026

🤯 Verification doesn't have to be just code review, screenshots, movies, and tests/CI. You can tell AI to configure staging like prod and replay prod traffic to reproduce failures and then fix them. Codex has been doing this on repeat the past two days hardening box out's renderer.

Developer monitoring staged build process with text commands and logs on screen.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 02/09/2026

Today is new laptop day! Nope, I didn't get a dell xps or framework or x1 carbon. I got a macbook air 13". I wanted the lightest, smallest mac for now. Not quite ready for the linux/omarchy revolution. Plan is to leave my M1 with 64GB of RAM at home to just run Codex remotely.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 02/09/2026

Nice little pattern for background tasks that need to be rate limited a bit: start to start throttling. If you need 1/sec, don't sleep 1. Sleep for the difference 1 minus the duration of the work.

Code editor displaying Python script with timing logic, showing variables for request tracking and delay calculations with conditional statements.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 02/09/2026

Shipped curated playlists today. Nice little feature where you can control exactly what you want on a playlist and then embed it on your own site.

Podcast playlist management interface showing 'Standing in the Fire' podcast with 7 of 50 episodes listed for selection and customization.

Podcast management interface showing "Add episodes" modal with search results for AI-related episodes from Standing in the Fire podcast.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 26/08/2026

GPT Sol has been obsessed with locks of late. About to drop something in my agents file to be like chill bro.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 26/08/2026

This graph of github growth in AI era is INSANE. Went from slow and steady to hockey stick. Now wonder their having outages. Pulled it from github.blog/news-insights/company-n…

Graph showing trends in merged pull requests per month, reaching 130M for August 2026.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 26/08/2026

Whoa. Check out this silly prompt and the amazing result. 🤯

Screen recording showing video thumbnails for podcast clips on AI and programming topics.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 26/08/2026

Another favorite thing of mine, which I know I've mentioned a few times but here's a screenshot, is telling it to record a movie in the simulator or the browser so I don't have to spin up servers and make fake test data and all that stuff. Huge time saver.

Screen displaying a blue PNG image cache confirmation message.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 26/08/2026

My new favorite thing to remove me from the equation of deploy is to just tell the agent to do it like I would. Merge. Wait for deploy. Monitor metrics post-deploy. If successful, archive task in codex. If not, notify me. Great for small things and never forgets to check after deploy (like I do).

Chat log discussing updates to a Flipper task and cache import.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 21/08/2026

Accidentally burned through my honeybadger error budget via staging errors. Contacted support and they removed my rate limit for the month! Amazing support. Also pointed me to the throttle setting per project where you can rate limit. Set staging to 1/min so it doesn't happen again.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 20/08/2026

Sometimes I feel like my job these days is what’s next, do it, fix it and continue. I need to start maybe putting some stuff in place to reduce this. 😆 I did ask codex to review in a sub agent with sol high, fix findings, commit and loop until no findings today and it did work quite swimmingly.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 19/08/2026

One thing I struggle with in codex (file bar is white bg) is telling when the file has changed in the diff (yes I still read some code haha). I wish they contained it like github does (file bar is grey bg). Makes it way more easy to keep track of where you are when scanning.

Code snippet showing modifications in a Ruby on Rails model for podcast episodes.

Code snippet showing changes in a Ruby file related to episode and podcast models.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 19/08/2026

Working on entirely in memory reads for flipper cloud folks. Coming soon!

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 19/08/2026

Been hacking on a Roku app for box out screens and its pretty neat. You just put your device in dev mode and then you can upload your app to it. The sim is the stick/tv. I just have a 32" tv sitting beside my desk to test. Hoping to release apple tv and firestick soon too.

Television showing an animated character with GitHub acquisition tweet on display.

Close-up of a TCL Roku TV displaying streaming options and menu.

Boxout graphics interface showing screen with list of uploaded images including kittens, animals, and quote graphics with duration timestamps.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 16/08/2026

The last big Fireside migration is postgres 9.5 => 18. It's all queued up, tested and ready to go. Wish I could do planet scale but fireside compute is in Fremont, CA and no regions close enough. So I'm going with linode managed for now. Same datacenter so same latency.

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 16/08/2026

Officially initiating the move of fireside from Dan's account to Very Good's. Stressful! This is the last piece from the acquisition and I'm so glad I put it off for almost 2 years because Codex and Claude made it so much easier. Hoping it works like Cloudflare says it will!

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 13/08/2026

I love doing podcasts. I feel like I make a new friend every time. 😊

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John Nunemaker @johnnunemaker.com · 13/08/2026

The downside of compound engineering or gstack with claude or codex is it definitely slows the process down and sometimes it gets so complicated I get nervous. I've even reverted and tried to simplify things a bit. It gets so hammered on "correct in all scenarios no matter the cost".

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