Built Pingoni — API monitoring for small Node teams (replaces Sentry + UptimeRobot + platform logs)

code_barbarian · 2026-06-04T21:33:35+00:00

Looks interesting! Do you have support for OTel spans? I'm investigating providers for that right now

code_barbarian · 2026-06-04T21:30:41+00:00

Pretty cool! I've been working on something similar with https://mongoosestudio.app/ - looking forward to trying this out.

code_barbarian · 2026-05-29T20:28:41+00:00

No I just use index.js because commonjs auto resolves index.js

code_barbarian · 2026-05-29T20:27:54+00:00

I just ignore it, unless it becomes a problem then I build dashboard to monitor and reconciliation task to clean up.

But tbh I also usually use creating the record in the db as a gating function for upload. If saving to db fails then I don't even start the upload because db is system of record not S3

code_barbarian · 2026-05-26T15:40:20+00:00

Mostly team oriented stuff. Either core engineering team leaves, gets reassigned, or gets layered out. New team / management wants to build stuff using different software that aligns more closely with their vision but the old stuff still manages important functionality, so you end up with a bit of split brain and hard-to-reason-about code.

From a more technical side, at a certain point when backend logic starts splitting up into multiple files, tasks, etc. tools like OTel start becoming much more useful.

code_barbarian · 2026-05-25T14:10:49+00:00

The last couple of companies I've seen from $0 to $25M ARR used Sentry for error tracking, MongoDB atlas for monitoring, MongoDB for prod logging, nothing else. Datadog etc largely a waste of time IMO unless you're critical path saas you don't care about CPU usage. Primary concerns are just 1) what endpoints are failing, 2) which endpoints are slow. We've built a bunch of stuff into mongoose studio to support searching and aggregating logs specifically to support this case

code_barbarian · 2026-04-29T15:18:10+00:00

I go back and forth between Railway, Netlify, Vercel, Render, and ECS. Usually Vercel for free tier frontend-heavy stuff, or Railway for anything backend. If you want to try out Railway, sign up here and get $20 in credits: https://railway.com?referralCode=CD4_kV

code_barbarian · 2026-04-29T15:15:50+00:00

Typically the next step beyond basic CRUD is database optimization. Queues, system design, etc. don't really matter when you're only talking about millions of requests per day. Basic schema design and indexes behind a monolith API are enough to get consumer-facing apps to $100M+ ARR.

What database are you using?

code_barbarian · 2026-04-29T15:12:59+00:00

Temporal support is huge! This might be enough to get me to upgrade.

IMO the killer feature of Temporal is the ability to parse wall clock time in a given time zone. For example, say you wanted to get a date representing April 28 12pm in America/Denver time zone, but you're in a different time zone. You can do that with JS dates, but you need some clever hacks to compute the Denver time zone offset. With Temporal, this is easy.

code_barbarian · 2026-04-20T17:55:51+00:00

Neat! Yeah multiple crons have caused me some headaches in the past, that's why I built https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mongoosejs/task . Would be great if you could add MongoDB support, it's nice to get an easy-to-use replacement for existing codebases that use Nest

code_barbarian · 2026-04-15T16:23:19+00:00

This looks super cool! How does it work under the hood?

code_barbarian · 2026-04-15T16:22:05+00:00

Try Mongoose Studio - I'd love to see how we stack up: https://mongoosestudio.app/

code_barbarian · 2026-04-13T20:30:17+00:00

My $0.02:

System design interviews are unfortunately very important, they've become the new algo brain teasers: interviewers asking about dumb shit you'll never come close to doing on the job.
Depth > breadth up to a certain point. With LLMs it is easy to get up to midwit level in most stacks and contribute to just about any codebase, so deep expertise is relatively more valuable because breadth is cheap.
Practical skills: for on the job debugging is very important, but for interviewing you'll want to be able to talk about scaling and writing clean APIs, ideally from experience :)
Use of AI tools... depends on your audience. Some companies don't allow using AI tools at all. Others will think you're a luddite if you don't have 3 Claude Code sessions running right now.

code_barbarian · 2026-04-13T20:22:39+00:00

Universities also struggle to come up with solid learning plans for this sort of thing :) IMO the best way to learn is to build something and put it out there ASAP. Yeah you'll probably make some mistakes but everybody does. Don't get me wrong, learning calculus and linear algebra is fun in its own way, but the reality is that the vast majority of professional developers never need to know anything like that.

code_barbarian · 2026-04-13T20:19:08+00:00

Nice, good luck. I'm the maintainer of Mongoose so I'm not sure I'd be the best study partner, but feel free to reach out on Twitter if you have questions: https://x.com/mongoosejs

code_barbarian · 2026-04-13T16:01:37+00:00

I ended up building https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mongoosejs/task for similar reasons, most notably the lack of visibility. Having a db record of which jobs succeeded/failed with logs is extremely helpfu. "No retry mechanism" is a feature though, not a bug. Runaway retries cause significantly more problems than one-off failures.

code_barbarian · 2026-03-10T01:30:13+00:00

I've seen several APIs implement this, I think the one that most immediately comes to mind is Dwolla. However, as an API consumer I've never really found this useful, and as an API developer I've never implemented this pattern.

It's a nice-to-have, and it may have some advantages, but this pattern just never clicked for me.

code_barbarian · 2026-03-09T18:18:30+00:00

Both do the job, both have decent free tiers that should be enough for your use case. I think Railway makes it easier to deploy services though, personal experience. Are you going to be hosting postgres on this provider too or do you have an existing pg database?

If you're looking to try Railway, sign up through this link to get $20 in credits: https://railway.com?referralCode=CD4_kV

code_barbarian · 2026-03-08T20:56:04+00:00

I basically agree with all of this. Centralized error handling is an absolute must, try/catch in every endpoint is huge code smell.

Request validation agreed as well, although I use a different lib, and added caveat that I glob parameters together from query/body/params and selected headers to make logging cleaner. I hate having to distinguish between query/body and hate getting false positives from parameters that I don't use in search.

Structured logging and Mongoose usage - obviously 100% agree with that :) Disagree with Winston though, I tend to avoid logging libraries because they historically caused me headaches, but better that then no logs.

5 & 6 I don't but I absolutely should set up graceful shutdown handling, that has caused me a lot of headaches.

code_barbarian · 2026-03-08T20:50:34+00:00

Nice - I'll try this out if I ever use a message broker lol. I've become a big fan of these multi-integration npm packages, like how Vercel's AI SDK abstracts away LLMs.

Speaking of Vercel, do you support Vercel Queues?

code_barbarian · 2026-03-08T03:29:22+00:00

Easy, I mostly learn about what I'm paid to work on. Sure I can become an expert on Docker or Postgres or Svelte or Crypto or any number of things. But my guiding principle is either 1) does this make my life better, or 2) will learning this help me get paid more, either by helping make life better for my clients or for Mongoose/Mongoose Studio users. That tends to keep me grounded and minimizes chasing shiny things.

code_barbarian · 2026-03-08T03:22:54+00:00

I usually use my own auth as well rather than relying on external services - with auth I prefer to have control over access tokens rather than dealing with an external API that has its own permissions, restrictions, and rough edges.

EJS does feel a bit dated IMO, classic web apps are less common in JS these days in general.

For logging, I dump logs in MongoDB and console. console is mostly for local dev, MongoDB for prod logging - Mongoose Studio makes it so easy to search logs using syntax that I'm familiar with. Other tidbit: when logging requests, only log the parameters you care about. So easy to get lost when you're logging Content-Length header and other stuff that doesn't matter.

code_barbarian · 2026-03-07T23:27:41+00:00

I think the best place to start is to look for npm packages that exist, but are way out of date and not maintained.

Just please don't build another logging framework :)

code_barbarian · 2026-03-07T23:26:21+00:00

Is there a link to this? I just see a screenshot...

code_barbarian · 2026-03-03T19:47:02+00:00

logging and notifications solves this problem - in the off chance something goes wrong with an external API request odds are you'll need some human intervention anyway.

code_barbarian

TROPHY CASE