Last year, while we were coming up to the date of launching the new Monitive, I wanted a new homepage to go in harmony with the new service. As we were focusing 100% on finalizing the service, there were few resources for the actual website. I only knew the following: So after about a week of research and brainstorming, we decided to go with Hugo static site generator, the Jumpstart theme by MediumRare and just a single landing homepage and the legal pages (privacy policy and terms of use).

For our API, we’ve been happily using NewRelic’s monolog enricher for a while, which sends our application logs to NewRelic at the end of each request, making it light and fast for our system not to be bothered by it. Until it stopped working with the upgrade to Composer 2, and they knew about it for several months and still didn’t do a single thing to fix it. So I decided to move to Logflare. Logflare is a fast, light, scalable, and powerful logging aggregator.

This is what I’ve learned in 10 years of running an uptime monitoring business detecting over 2 million outages for over 4k users around the world…

Reading through the Traffic Secrets book by Russell Brunson I found out about a very interesting tip of Gary Vaynerchuk: Document. Don’t create. For years, the fact that we cannot provide transparency from what we learn as we’re moving along and growing was a constant thorn in my back. Even when we decided to do a marketing (a.k.a. content) push with our blog, it did not bring that much value since I, as the founder of Monitive, didn’t find the time to write.

In the new light of website performance that I’m pursuing, I have learned to avoid Javascript at all costs. Here’s a nice Javascript-less desktop and mobile navigation update that we’ve added to our website. Inspired by Dirk Olbrich’s Hugo Starter Theme with Tailwind CSS this works by displaying a regular navigation bar on landscape tablets and desktop resolutions, but changes into a nice dropdown on mobile resolutions.

Two years ago I decided to migrate our Monitive blog to a Medium publication called Once Upon A Site. This happened for several reasons, including the fact that we are getting more readers on Medium than we were getting on our blog at the time. Of course, all while ignoring all there is to SEO. This was a good call at the time.

Lumen is a stripped down version of the powerful and now very popular Laravel PHP framework, focused on performance and serving stateless requests. I doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Laravel, but it also doesn’t need them when serving API requests. For example, sessions, cookies and views are not a part of Lumen. It’s not intended for serving websites so everything around that got ditched.

There are 6 weeks left of 2020, which means it’s about time we wrap this year up, focus on what’s most important, and leave the nice-to-have endeavors for next year. For Monitive, that means finalizing all the features that our users need to completely migrate from the (now old) Monitive Classic to the new and shiny Monitive. We’re sunsetting Monitive Classic just before Christmas, so my number one goal is to ensure that every user only has downtime that they know about.

There are a lot of tools, apps and services. If you’ve been following Product Hunt, you already know that startups and new apps are being launched every single day. A startup these days is so common that even high-school kids are doing it. There are endless rivers of guides, books and knowhow on how to do it, and since most startups have some sort of product or service, there might be an app for pretty much anything you might think of.

As time goes by, I’m looking for solutions that require as little maintenance as possible. One of those is deploying our client web app and our homepage directly on the CDN edge, with GitHub Actions. Not only we don’t need a server to host the app, but the deployment script is also serverless and maintenance-less. This allows me to focus on important tasks, knowing that deployment and serving of the app is always blazing fast.