In April I kept focusing on making Status Pages better than ever, and added a new on-call integration: incident.io.

March was a fun month for OnlineOrNot. I spoke to more customers than ever before, developed a long roadmap for OnlineOrNot's status page functionality (it's going to be an even better stand-alone product), heartbeat checks are going to support cron expressions, and more.

Incidents are a stressful time for your team: your service isn't working the way you expect and your customers/stakeholders want to know what's going on. The last thing you want to do is let your team improvise everything when it comes to responding to incidents. Google's own SRE book has great overall tips for incident management, part of which involves "develop(ing) and document(ing) your incident management procedures in advance", which this article dives into.

Over December and January I focused on OnlineOrNot's public API, making it possible to see what OnlineOrNot saw when it detected a failing uptime check, as well as fixing bugs and cleaning up tech debt across all of OnlineOrNot (it's getting faster and faster to release updates).

You might be thinking “building HTTP API docs from scratch? in 2024? wtf?”, and you’re probably right. After all redoc has been around since 2016, and there are hundreds of “generate beautiful documentation from your OpenAPI spec” startups around, some even use AI now. To be honest, I didn’t even know it was possible to do-it-yourself when I started looking into it.

It'll soon be the third anniversary of publicly launching OnlineOrNot on Twitter, and I often get asked what I did to get my first paying customers - so I felt like sharing. I assume when most folks ask this that they're looking for the one thing they can do to finally start getting paid customers. Let me be clear: it's never just one thing.

Over October and November I focused on adding new features to Status Pages and making it easier to iterate on new features, as well as fixing bugs across all of OnlineOrNot.

If you don't know what a "cron job" is or how the cron job expression syntax works (and at this point are too afraid to ask), you're in the right place. In this article, we'll dive into what is a cron job, how they work, and the details that often get overlooked, like cron job schedule syntax and common cron job errors.

Coming back from August holidays, I felt the need to take a hard look at what OnlineOrNot does, and keep improving it.

When you're building a serverless web app, it can be pretty easy to forget about the database. You build a backend, send some data to a frontend, write some tests, and it'll scale to infinity with no effort, right? Not quite. Especially not with a tiny Postgres server. As the number of users of your frontend increases, your app will open more and more database connections until the database is unable to accept any more. That's just the frontend - it gets worse on the backend.