A big part of Checkly runs on AWS Lambda, but I never really discussed it in depth before on this blog. So here we go. Topics are:A little bit on our Lambda setup.Why Lambda is an almost perfect match for SaaS. Especially when you're small.Why I don't…
Ok, not completely true. I also use Stripe, Github, AWS, Heroku, Ghost, AppOptics, Intercom and Mailchimp. And some bookkeeping and tax tools. Don't forget the code editors! But! When I plan my day, I spend most of my time in Trello and Apple's stock Reminders app. I also use Numbers…
Recently I pushed a long overdue feature for Checkly: SSL for customers' public dashboards. This was kinda, sort of, totally missing when I launched and many customers asked for it. Setting up free SSL turned out to be fairly smooth because of Let's Encrypt.A great NPM package called GreenLock.…
Something different this week. I got an email from an aspiring SaaS bootstrapper. Let's call him John. John explained his working situation at a tech startup and his dream to start a SaaS in the cloud security space by himself. He also had some pretty good questions. I asked John…
update 05-06-19: Digital Ocean has posted their postmortem on this situation as mentioned by their CTO Barry Cooks in the comments.Last Friday May 31, Nicolas Beauvais, CTO and only tech person of small startup raisup.com, took to Twitter with a cry for help. Their cloud hosting company Digital…
Last week I rolled out a simple patch that decimated the response time of a Postgres query crucial to Checkly. It quite literally went from an average of ~100ms with peaks to 1 second to a steady 1ms to 10ms.However, that patch was just the last step of a…
There is a lot of dogma around shipping a product in startup land. Many founders follow strict patterns they got from a book or some influencer's tweet. "Ship Early" is one of the more stubborn ones, and in many cases it is exactly the right thing to do. The earlier…
During the spring and summer of 2018 I was negotiating a possible acquihire of Checkly / moi with Datadog. I'm only writing about it right now because Datadog recently launched their Synthetics product — the product I would be involved with as some form of product manager.This post details how this…
Over the last year or so, I experimented with different ways of getting customer feedback for Checkly. This post is about what worked for us and how I was totally wrong about chat widgets.We'll look at some common tools like Hotjar, Drift, SurveyMonkey, straight up email and even Github.…
Two weeks ago we released the public API for Checkly. This post is about what parts we needed to refactor, what parts we added and how we handled generating API documentation. More specifically, we'll dive into:Refactoring the existing Hapi.js based APIAPI key based authenticationRefactoring models with Objection.jsValidating…