Hey HN! I posted this on April 1st when it launched, and though it didn't get traction here, it was a minor hit on reddit! Now that we've got a few thousand monkeys under our belt, wanted to give it another shot here!<p>Happy to talk about the technical details of running the site - using supabase/postgres and constantly putting out fires from the traffic.
Funny that one can login and claim a monkey, and customize its working environment. In an alternate universe where a version of you wants to make a buck, they'd sell "monkeycoins" that users can earn to get customizations for their monkey (like the fancy couch or a Macbook).<p>Did I say earn? I mean buy...
Ha! When I was first learning to program in high school, I wrote a 'distributed monkeys-on-typewriters' simulator. I somehow acquired a stack of surplus Pentium 100s that I had running in an unused closet at the school, communicating with each other over IPX. I remember the server had a fun 'Guess-operations-per-second' (GOPS) realtime display.
This is adorably cute, and deceptively fun to follow along with. I particularly like that it shows which monkey discovered a word first, making you want to visit back and see if your monkey found any new words.<p>One thing I'd like to see is a way to go back from the "Word view" (after you clicked to see details about a specific word) back to your monkey view with the list of words.
Impressive.
Few problems, after sign-in could not get a monkey until hard refresh, big monkey is flickering like crazy on chrome M3 14", <a href="https://monkeys.zip/profile" rel="nofollow">https://monkeys.zip/profile</a> is not working when accessed directly.
That’s fun!<p>Couple of things I would suggest:<p>Maybe get rid of 1-2 character words in the word counter? Seems easy for it to hit things like i or ie etc. I would love to see a counter that ignores those at least<p>Also the report card section on the Shakespeare progress panel wasn’t scrollable on iOS.<p>Neat either way!
Looks interesting, but after two (<30s) attempts I gave up trying to figure out what it even is . There’s no about page, there’s some stats that I don’t know the significance of, there’s a blog that talks about improvements… But there’s just no straightforward description of what the heck I’m even looking at besides some fun monkey animations.