Postmortems, engineering deep-dives, and the small decisions behind a monitoring tool people can actually rely on.
A single trigger wired to the wrong table meant every new signup would have failed — and every digest email would have silently gone nowhere. Here's how I found it before opening the doors.
A personal, owner-only page to stop bouncing between the Hetzner, Supabase, and Resend consoles by hand — and it immediately surfaced a stack of real database performance issues I didn't know I had.
Before renting a real server, I built a load-testing rig to find Impulseye's actual ceiling. It reported a ceiling that didn't exist — the test harness itself had two bugs, and both of them looked exactly like a capacity problem.
Discord, Slack, Teams, Telegram, Google Chat, PagerDuty, and Pushover each format an alert differently — and each one will silently reject you if you don't respect its limits. Here's what I wish I'd known on day one.
Nine channels, six alert types, three monitor kinds, reminders, flapping — that's a lot of ways for a message to come out malformed. So I built a tiny script whose entire job is to try all of them.
Three fix attempts, two of them wrong, before I found the actual culprit: a property that behaves completely differently on iOS Safari than everywhere else I tested it.
Any feature that lets a user tell your server to make an HTTP request to a URL of their choosing is a server-side request forgery surface — even if it looks like an innocent settings field. Here's how I hardened mine.