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Cronitor
Company blog · blog.cronitor.iostartupsprogramming
Cronitor is the company blog at blog.cronitor.io, writing about startups and programming. Since 2015, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “The JIT Startup: Why we waited 2 years to build a change email form”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Monitoring made for developers. Monitor AI agents, cron jobs, websites, APIs, and everything in between — with instant alerts when something breaks.
Most-linked posts?
- The JIT Startup: Why we waited 2 years to build a change email form2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-02-23
What Hacker News says?
Last year I wrote about the AWS spend of my SaaS business, Cronitor [1]. I couldn't imagine building a service like this without modern cloud providers, but it is no wonder to me why AWS generates all of Amazon's profit. Essentially our migration over the years looks like: 1) Moving to EC2 from a VPS, The Ec2 instance with same specs is notably slower and you need to add a second instance where one worked before. 2)…
Comment linking /the-aws-spend-of-a-saas-side-business-30bd5dbd91b
on “Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of AWS”Submitted Lessons Learned with Stripe Subscriptions as a story · 210 points
HN discussionWe have finite time to improve a product. Any minutes spent racking servers (physically or otherwise) are minutes spent not working on something that adds value for our users. Driving the top line is more important than optimizing expenses that are relatively small. We started Cronitor as a side business and we've grown by seeking out the highest leverage usage of our time. My cofounder wrote a blog post about this…
Comment linking /the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0
on “AWS Application Load Balancer”Submitted The AWS Spend of Our SaaS Side-Business as a story · 165 points
HN discussionThe post mentions Falcon at the end. At Cronitor, I rebuilt our ping tracking endpoint (peaks over 100r/s) with Falcon, breaking it out of Django, and I wrote a blog post about it: https://blog.cronitor.io/scaling-django-breaking-out-not-bre... Here's a tldr: Logging requests to a flat file on a t2.small instance: Django: 519.93 trans/sec Falcon: 2083.19 trans/sec
Comment linking /scaling-django-breaking-out-not-breaking-up-c48b4a9e4a96
on “Building Large Flask Apps in the Real World”Submitted Scaling Django: Breaking out not breaking up as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThis is great advice, but when a customer is asking for something already on your roadmap, or fits with your product vision, then it can provide an opportunity where a feature can close new business and add equity to the business overall. At Cronitor, we call this technique the JIT Startup[0] . There are dozens of instances where we've delayed writing code for something until it's actually requested, from boilerplat…
Comment linking /the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0
on “Users You Don’t Want”Submitted The JIT Startup: Why we waited 2 years to build a change email form as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYou beat me to this comment by a minute! I've run engineering teams in SFBA for years and have, with a friend, built Cronitor. I've come to believe the most valuable "soft" skill in an engineer is just a relentless drive to ship, to know how to be both tactical and strategic in avoiding over-engineering. With Cronitor, we call it the JIT Mindset: Don't actually write code until you have to, and focus on solving most…
Comment linking /the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0
on “Hidden work when launching a SaaS”Submitted Lessons learned with Stripe subscriptions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt’s very hard to manage your time as a nights and weekends project. You should consider it a skill of equal importance as coding/design/marketing. I’ve written about it here: https://blog.cronitor.io/the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0 The main takeaway: "If you’re a software developer it’s especially tempting to justify spending more time on your software. You’ve worked with tangled messes of code in the past and suffered…
Comment linking /the-jit-startup-bb1a13381b0
on “A Failed SaaS Postmortem”Mostly Python. Django for web app and rest API. The Falcon micro-framework for telemetry collection API. The dashboard is a React SPA (since 2014!) that is powered entirely by our REST API so new features are always API-enabled. Alerting rules are handled by a Python daemon that processes the event stream. Healthchecks are dispatched by coordinators to Lambda workers in a half dozen regions around the world. We star…
Comment linking /the-aws-spend-of-a-saas-side-business-30bd5dbd91b
on “Ask HN: What weekend projects have you created?”