In a recent post on customer feedback I mentioned being a recent convert to chat widget-driven tools. I thought they sucked, but I was wrong. Since then, I actually switched from Drift to Intercom because Intercom's focus — support & communication — matched my business better than Drift's heavy sales focus. To…
Update 14-08-2019: Greenlock is awesome but needs support. If you don't want to code this yourself consider donating $100 or so on their indiegogo page so they can ship Greenlock v3 and stay compatible with the Let's Encrypt API.Recently I pushed a long overdue feature for Checkly: SSL for…
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…
This is a short follow up to last week's story on Stripe Billing as a reader on Hackernews commented that it seemed we didn't handle VAT. We do, but I just left it out of the story.Update 25-04-2019: Stripe just released a big update to their Billing product that…
When I started Checkly, all the typical SaaS things around billing, credit cards and prorating confused the hell out of me. I understood them from an intellectual point of view, but not really from an implementation point of view.Sure, I hooked up some payment providers (Adyen, Paypal) at previous…
If you run a SaaS, you probably want to show a user that he/she is almost running out of widgets. Or that he/she can get some cool feature on a more expensive plan. In this post we look at how implemented this in our Vue.js frontend application.…
How do you deal with what a user can do on their account in a SaaS app? Can Jane on the "Starter" plan create another widget when she is near the limit of her plan? What if she's a trial user?Turns out this is a mix of thingsFeature togglingCounting…
2018 was an interesting year for Node.js frameworks and open source software in general. Developer communities discussed the role of corporate sponsorship and how to maintain a project used by millions but not supported financially.Similarly, security concerns were top of mind with some popular Node / JS packages being…
Since launch, we didn’t pay too much attention to the front end performance of the main Checkly web app. Shame on us. What better reason to dive into this than the publishing of the excellent The Cost of Javascript in 2018 by Google’s Addy Osmani?TL;DR: it…
Last week, we shipped an initial version of Puppeteer Recorder, a Google Chrome extension that records your browser interactions and generates a Puppeteer script.It turns out Chrome extension development is almost like real web development, but with a weird dash of quasi embedded development mixed in.This post talks…