We just shipped three updates based on customer feedback.

I post openly about MRR, churn and other SaaS stuff on Twitter. I do this mostly for marketing purposes. Not going to lie. It's also kinda fun. At least when things are growing...

When adding a new feature to Checkly or refactoring some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda.

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 get the most out of Intercom, you need to integrate it with your app. This means instrumenting some code and tweaking some bits of your app's navigation.

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: Note, I'm using "Lambda" here as a stand in for "serverless" in general. Many of the things discussed here apply to either Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions and possibly Zeit although I've never used it. First something on how we use Lambda. Last week we went over 35 million check runs.

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 once a week or so. This post is turning out to be click bait. Read on, it's really not. In former jobs I went through probably every project management and productivity tool out there.

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 Most principles explained here are totally transferable to whatever stack you are using. There are some pretty important gotcha's though, so let's dive in. Customers of Checkly can create public dashboards and host them on a custom domain.

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 if it was OK if I answered them in the form of a blog post. He agreed, so here we are.

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 Ocean had just locked their account and made it clear that this was permanent.

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 longer journey. This post details those steps and all the stuff I learned along the way. We'll look at how I analyzed performance issues, tested fixes and how simple Postgres optimizations can have spectacular results.