The best kind of engineering spite is the kind that teaches you something. Some developer just looked at their ipinfo bill, said "absolutely not," and figured out you can geolocate IP addresses by... just pinging a bunch of servers and doing basic geometry with the latency. It's beautiful. It's petty. It's a middle finger disguised as a blog post.

Here's the actual technique: you ping the target IP from multiple known locations, measure the round-trip times, and triangulate the position based on the speed of light through fiber. It's not as accurate as paid geolocation databases, but it's accurate enough for most use cases and costs exactly zero dollars. The author basically reverse-engineered a feature that companies charge per-lookup for using nothing but high school physics and the observation that data packets obey the laws of spacetime.

But this isn't really about IP geolocation. This is about the Great Developer Awakening happening right now where engineers are realizing how many "APIs" are just thin wrappers around publicly available data or techniques you could implement yourself in an afternoon. We've been in a decade-long SaaS fever dream where the default answer to every problem became "find a service for that" instead of "think about that." The pendulum is swinging back hard.

You see it everywhere once you start looking. Developers rage-building open source alternatives to services that got too expensive or too proprietary. The explosion of "awesome-X" lists full of self-hosted options. The return of the Unix philosophy applied to cloud services. People are rediscovering that sometimes the difference between a paid API and free solution is just someone having the audacity to try. Geolocation services are selling convenience and liability coverage, not magic. Once you understand the underlying technique, the value proposition shifts dramatically.

The timing matters too. AI is making it easier to understand and implement these techniques that used to require specialized knowledge. You can ask an LLM "how would I geolocate an IP using latency" and get a working implementation in minutes. The moat around "developer experience" businesses is getting shallower because the experience gap between "use our API" and "roll your own" is narrowing fast. When the barrier to DIY drops low enough, pricing pressure becomes existential.

This is also a reminder that the internet still runs on physics, not vibes. Data packets travel through fiber at roughly two-thirds the speed of light in a vacuum. That creates constraints you can measure and exploit. There's something refreshing about a solution that works because of fundamental constants rather than vendor goodwill or API rate limits. You can't deprecate the speed of light or change the pricing tier on geometry.

The really uncomfortable question for the API economy: how many other "essential" services are just clever applications of basic principles that we've collectively forgotten because it's easier to add a dependency? How much of the modern dev stack is theater where we pay for convenience we don't need and accuracy we don't use? Someone just demonstrated you can geolocate IPs with ping and math. What else are we paying for that we could just... do?