OnlineOrNot

It's fairly common for folks in tech to dream of quitting their day job and working on their side projects.

Hacker News is a forum run by Y Combinator that tends to focus on topics relating to computer science and entrepreneurship.

After things go wrong and the incident is resolved, it's time to learn.

Your engineers probably dislike going on-call for your services.

The other day, a friend told me about fly.io's nice developer experience (DX).

Incidents are a stressful time for your team: your service isn't working the way you expect and your customers want to know what's going on.

It's 2am.

This time last year, I showed the internet a little prototype uptime checker I built using Next.js as the frontend, with services running on AWS Lambda.

Imagine you're having a regular day at work, opening up your browser, double checking something for a client in that web app your team built for them, when suddenly, you see this screen: You hit refresh a few times, just to be sure.

In case you missed it, for several hours on December 7, 2021, AWS's us-east-1 region had an outage impacting multiple AWS APIs, taking out various websites across the internet.

Say you've been tasked with monitoring an application, so you set up some alerts to let you know when errors are coming in.

You've joined a company, or worked there a little while, and you've just now realised that you'll have to do on-call.

Like all good things in infrastructure, picking whether or not to self-host your database is full of trade-offs.

In case you missed it, for about 15 minutes on June 8, 2021, Fastly's CDN had an outage, taking some of the internet's largest websites down (including the BBC, UK government, Reddit, and the New York Times - Amazon.com also had its CSS fail to load).

No matter where you live, if your business targets a global audience, the question of where to host your website comes up pretty often.

Chances are, you've run a PageSpeed Insights test and noticed "First Contentful Paint" as one of the first numbers in the report.

You might be looking around for a new web host, or trying to get a better deal.

If your experience is anything like mine, you're probably pretty confused about all the acronyms involved in checking your page speed.

Introduction Page Speed is a pretty big deal these days.

If you've ever had to be on the receiving end of a monitoring system that uses email for alerts, you know how noisy things can get.

When I first started building SaaS apps for side projects, it would take me a solid weekend solely to build the Stripe integration.

Sometimes you'll want to migrate WordPress hosts - maybe it's time for renewal, and you found a better deal elsewhere, or your hosting provider isn't as reliable as they promised.