Archive

Hello everyone!

Here are a few updates on what I’ve been working on in April for Chiffre.

Status

Hello everyone!

It’s been a while. What started as a weekly log of building Chiffre and following the 100 Days of Tech Startup challenge ended up stalling last July.

Life gets in the way. Obviously, 2020 did make things more difficult for everyone, and in my case (I won’t bother you too long with my life, I promise) I took some time off software development in the summer to move into a new home with my wife. Silver lining: we became first-time parents in November, and it’s been quite the ride ever since. 👶🍼💩

Hi everyone,

I'm still in the middle of moving houses, here are some quick personal updates:

My wife and I are expecting our first child, a baby boy coming in November. We decided to move back to Grenoble, where we met and closer to our friends and family. We've found a new place and are moving this week, so I've been trading making NPM packages with packing real boxes. 😅📦

I'm pausing the development of Chiffre for the rest of the summer holidays, to focus on my family and take a well-deserved rest after working on the MVP for a few months in the middle of COVID-lockdown. It gave me some purpose during difficult times, but when life is calling back, only a fool would miss out on it.

Hi everyone!

There was no issue of the newsletter last week, as I was hunting for apartments, and will be moving at the end of the month, so development in general is going to be slowing down a lot in the near future.

My wife and I are expecting our first child, and we decided to move back to the city where we met, closer to our friends and family, in Grenoble, France. I'm actually writing this newsletter on my phone on a train, things are a bit crazy, especially after the slow period of COVID-19 lockdown.

Back to Chiffre: one of the early users, Mike Nikles, who uses Chiffre on his new website, announced the release of his book on Cloud Native Web Development, which generated a lot of traffic (20k events in one day! 🤯). Congrats Mike on publishing your book!

Hi everyone!

Last week I had interesting discussions with some Chiffre users about the Origin filter feature. It's something I had put in place early on, to prevent "spam analytics" coming from other domains than your production website. This could happen for many reasons:

• Local development (from localhost, 127.0.0.1)
• Preview URLs
• Staging environments

My initial assumption was that a project was tied to a particular deployment, and you'd use additional projects if you really wanted to measure a staging environment. But that assumption did not take account limits into consideration at the time, so it does not work anymore. (ICYMI: we discussed limits in week 4 of this newsletter).

Hi everyone!

Last week on Chiffre, I worked on some performance improvements to the webapp frontend, using Web Workers to do the heavy lifting off the UI thread, so that the interface can be more fluid and responsive. It’s going well, but there is still a lot to do and I’m sharing this time with freelancing work.

Bundler War Story

I did not send this email yesterday as I was battling a bug on the analytics tracker script: the bundler I use (Parcel) decided to break silently and deployed empty scripts to production! 😱

Hi everyone!

What started as a calm week for Chiffre took a busy turn on Friday. Not so much on the development or marketing front, I took some time off to focus on building my website and blog, but because my launch blog post got some traction on Twitter, and generated a lot of traffic, the largest sustained peak so far:

If you recall, last week I shared how I added Next.js metrics to my website, it turns out it was a great source of extra events, that for now are sitting on my account waiting for proper visualisation.

Hi everyone!

Not much has happened on Chiffre last week, I've been busy on other projects, I took some time off to arrange my thoughts and take advantage of the partial lockdown lift in France to get some fresh air.

Stats

We have passed the 10k mark! 🎉 It's my friend Romain Clement that passed the line with his website on the evening before my birthday, it was a nice early gift 😁

Hi everyone!

This is a summary of week 2 of my #100DaysOfTechStartup challenge with Chiffre.io. Not much has happened on the product side, but I've been busy on the marketing and social front. It's not as fun as coding, but I learned a lot.

TL;DR: The invites are at the end 😉

Newsletter

This is an archived post of the first edition of this newsletter that was send on 2020-05-15.

Hey everyone !

Quick update on Chiffre.io: I have joined the #100DaysOfTechStartup challenge on Twitter. 🎉🚀

Turning a side project into a full-time product is hard, especially on the accountability part. It's a solo project, and I'll need all the help I can get on that front.