I’ve been developing an observability platform [0] for small teams and indie developers where they can track logs, live metrics, and get alerted in realtime through webhooks. I intend to develop a dead simple on-call calendar as well in the coming weeks.
After using tools like Sentry on apps serving millions of users, I always felt I was missing a cheap and dead simple approach to following what happened in my apps and apis, and basically became my first customer for all of my side projects and even got some friends using it for their SaaS and apps.
I’m creating an observability tool that I’m trying to make user-centric while staying developer friendly. Most of the tools for remote logging, live dashboards and alerts are either too big, too expensive, or have a “per seat” plan, and incorporate the famous “home” screen with metrics and tips you absolutely never care of. I’m also trying to stay cheap and focused on very few techs (node, Postgres, docker, react) and make it stay as a monolith.
So far I’ve put all the side projects I manage (5 of them) and it’s working great. I can follow and query the logs, the JSON payloads by path, see live metrics like number of users currently online, etc. Even if I don’t get any customers I’ll continue developing it for my own needs! Will soon be adding alerts through webhooks, slack, discord, etc.
Edit: just want to say that if you want to try the software but not keep it, you can create an account in under 10 seconds, send a curl request to see logs arrive in realtime, and delete your account in 5 seconds. I do not track anything and do not keep a single piece of data.
> Even if I don’t get any customers I’ll continue developing it for my own needs!
That’s the spirit! A buddy of mine created a tool/API to solve his own problems, opened it to the public and launched it, but he got very few sign-ups, so he just continued to use it for himself. Recently, about two years later and out of nowhere (without doing anything other than the original bit of SEO he did), he started to see a bunch of sign-ups (including paid) and then started receiving feedback and support request emails from customers. Most folks would’ve just called it quits on the product at least a year ago, but he just kept using the product for his own projects and left it open to the public just in case it was helpful for anyone else. Obviously, YMMV, but good luck with this!
I’m on mobile right now, but I think I’ll give it a try when I’m back at my computer.
That's so refreshing to hear to be honest! I've went on so many side projects hoping I would see adoption for months and was basically chasing the dream. However I've came to realize that I really take happiness in developing things sustainably over time, with small steps, and most importantly for myself and what I would like a product to look like. Lately I've even been able to onboard a friend on it using it for his own projects as well, couldn't be happier so far.
If you ever have feedback/advices, don't hesitate to reach me out on contact[at]halftheopposite.dev and I'll happily answer.
For the past few weeks I have been working on Enhance [0], a SaaS to help game developers easily add leaderboards, friendlists, store players' data, in-app currency store and purchases, and marketing tools such as email list and website builder and hosting.
I am almost done with the landing page and don't think I'll put much more into it, and will continue working on the API itself. But I still plan on adding a playable game into the 3D scene just for the sake of it and to learn. But so far I'm struggling at projecting a 3D camera render to a texture inside an already existing 3D context.
I've actually went and looked over the sub reddit and it's a great resource for exactly what I was looking for (thanks even more for the Google Sheets).
Given the pricepoint and specs of the BeeLink, its availability for shipping in France, and the all-in-one design of the SER7 with USB-4, that seems like a great option to explore.
I will take a deeper look at their other offerings as well.
Very shameless plug on your last "Edit:", but I think it fits perfectly one feature that a web extension I made does: https://webcursors.click/.
There's a feature to write a note and leave it on the page for others (with the extension installed) to see and maybe have luck someone contacting you.
The design on your site reminds me of kinopio.club, I like the sort of whimsical style that doesn't compromise on utility.
> There's a feature to write a note and leave it on the page for others
Your site says that "nothing is stored." Does writing a note require everyone to be on the site at the same time? At first I thought it was sort of like the old "Dissenter" extension that added comments sections to every page, but the description seems to indicate a more live chat style.
https://webcursors.click - I should have spent more time thinking about solving a problem that doesn't exist and clearly you can feel that there's something missing.
Editing/deleting notes would require some sort of authentication for the backend to recognise ownership of the notes, but this could be a great incentive toward pushing users to sign up for the tool.
Will definitely look at scaling down font size for longer text (it should already be the case though but doesn't work well with long words or URLs).
Thanks! The hard part was actually understand Chrome extension's lifecycle and communication between the content script, popup, and service worker. What I initially thought was going to be hard, ended up being actually quite easy (cf socket.io).
I can imagine, browser extensions are a pain in the butt. Are you planning to open source the code? Did you build everything by yourself or on top of https://liveblocks.io/?
I was planning on open-sourcing the extension itself, but not the backend for now because of some secrets. But ultimately, my goal is to create a blog post to create a minimal yet functional Chrome extension connected to a backend with socket.io.
And didn't knew this service existed, so created everything myself so far.
Content moderation is a nightmare and I've been working in technical/product fields where this is a daily issue. The first choice was to make everything ephemeral: messages are not stored anywhere, and notes expires after n days. At least this covers some part of the issue, but this is only possible in the short term.
In the long term, if things go good for this extension, meaning more users and more things to moderate, I will have to introduce downvotes, reports, and most importantly some sort of authentication. That will still not be enough, and eventually I will have to resolve to text moderation APIs or language models (which we already do at work).
But I hope to stay in a sweet spot with enough users but not too many, and great collaboration! But one can always dream.
Hey! So for scaling it should scale quite easily with socket.io room’s implementation with Redis when required, and unless I’m having a hell lot of people on it at the same time it shouldn't be much of an issue given the small footprint.
For critical mass, this is why I’m developing features that are asynchronous (ex: notes) or app wide (ex: games that you can join with other users online no matter the website or page you're on).
After using tools like Sentry on apps serving millions of users, I always felt I was missing a cheap and dead simple approach to following what happened in my apps and apis, and basically became my first customer for all of my side projects and even got some friends using it for their SaaS and apps.
[0] https://app.getboringmetrics.com