First prize at IP2Location 2026: the six-day build log behind geotop
The 2026 IP2Location Programming Contest winners are out, and geotop took first prize. The award is USD $500 plus a two-year IP2Location.io Security Plan; the winners page values the whole package at USD $12,476. Second and third went to geotail and LocaSentinel. The short version is easy: geotop won. This is the longer one. I went back through both repositories — 34 commits in geotop, one in GeoSentinel-Ingress — and reconstructed what actually happened between 3 and 9 August 2026: what was deliberate, what was discovered by breaking a release, and what I would change before the next tag. ...