StatusCake

Engineering

Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)

5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything

Alerting Is a Socio-Technical System

3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting

Designing Alerts for Action

3 min read In the first two posts of this series, we explored how alert noise emerges from design decisions, and why notification lists fail to create accountability when responsibility is unclear. There’s a deeper issue underneath both of those problems. Many alerting systems are designed without being clear about the outcome they’re meant to produce. When teams

A Notification List Is Not a Team

3 min read In the previous post, we looked at how alert noise is rarely accidental. It’s usually the result of sensible decisions layered over time, until responsibility becomes diffuse and response slows. One of the most persistent assumptions behind this pattern is simple. If enough people are notified, someone will take responsibility. After more than fourteen years

Alert Noise Isn’t an Accident — It’s a Design Decision

3 min read In a previous post, The Incident Checklist: Reducing Cognitive Load When It Matters Most, we explored how incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones. These are moments where decision-making under pressure and cognitive load matter more than perfect root cause analysis. When systems don’t support people clearly in those moments, teams compensate.

The Incident Checklist: Reducing Cognitive Load When It Matters Most

4 min read In the previous post, we looked at what happens after detection; when incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones, with cognitive load as the real constraint. This post assumes that context. The question here is simpler and more practical. What actually helps teams think clearly and act well once things are already

When Things Go Wrong, Systems Should Help Humans — Not Fight Them

3 min read In the previous post, we explored how AI accelerates delivery and compresses the time between change and user impact. As velocity increases, knowing that something has gone wrong before users do becomes a critical capability. But detection is only the beginning. Once alerts fire and dashboards light up, humans still have to interpret what’s happening,

When AI Speeds Up Change, Knowing First Becomes the Constraint

5 min read In a recent post, I argued that AI doesn’t fix weak engineering processes; rather it amplifies them. Strong review practices, clear ownership, and solid fundamentals still matter just as much when code is AI-assisted as when it’s not. That post sparked a follow-up question in the comments that’s worth sitting with: With AI speeding things

Make Your Engineering Processes Resilient. Not Your Opinions About AI

4 min read Why strong reviews, accountability, and monitoring matter more in an AI-assisted world Artificial intelligence has become the latest fault line in software development.  For some teams, it’s an obvious productivity multiplier.  For others, it’s viewed with suspicion.  A source of low-quality code, unreviewable pull requests, and latent production risk. One concern we hear frequently goes

DNS
Engineering

What’s new in Chrome Devtools?

3 min read For any web developer, DevTools provides an irreplaceable aid to debugging code in all common browsers. Both Safari and Firefox offer great solutions in terms of developer tools, however in this post I will be talking about the highlights of the most recent features in my personal favourite browser for coding, Chrome DevTools. For something

Engineering

How To Create An Animated 3D Button From Scratch

6 min read There has certainly been a trend recently of using animations to elevate user interfaces and improve user experiences, and the more subtle versions of these are known as micro animations. Micro animations are an understated way of adding a little bit of fun to everyday user interactions such as hovering over a link, or clicking

website downtime
Engineering

The basics: How to use the StatusCake API

5 min read We offer an API that provides direct access to features the platform offer, with each feature providing a set of endpoints to perform operations on resources associated with your account. The StatusCake control panel offers plenty of useful visualisations and alerting systems so you can be in touch with your data, but sometimes we may have use-cases where we would rather leverage the API so in this blog post we’re going to see how we can make use of these endpoints using C#.

statuscake
Engineering

StatusCake GitHub Projects

4 min read I allows users of the platform to come up with custom ways of interacting and making our tools work for their specific needs. In this blog post I’m going to look at a few recent projects on GitHub that use the StatusCake API to either save you time or do something interesting with your test data.  

website down
Engineering

Website downtime: The one where Google Maps went down

2 min read March saw many of the big tech companies have technical issues with their products and services. But the biggest one was by far the colossal Google; Google Maps experienced the much dreaded website downtime impacting thousands of users across the globe. It was reported online that Google Maps had suffered a partial outage meaning that many couldn’t access the location tool. Read all about it here.

Engineering

The hottest new UI trends for 2022 (and how to achieve them!)

4 min read The web as a whole is constantly evolving and alongside this comes fantastic innovations in how we display content to the user. Some companies are really leading the way when it comes to innovative user interfaces, so in this blog post I will be highlighting a selection of the trends that these companies are pushing forward and how you can recreate them yourself on your own site.

storybook
Engineering

The endless capabilities of Storybook

4 min read As a developer, I am a massive fan of documentation and (as you can probably tell from my previous blog post) also a big fan of Storybook. If you’re interested in what Storybook is and how to set it up, or integrate it into your existing project, you can find out more about that here.  However, in this post, I am going to be outlining why you should be using Storybook and each of its features and capabilities. This is in addition to (at the time of writing) some exciting new additions to the library.

aspnet
Engineering

Using ASP.NET Core to create a CRUD WebAPI

5 min read In this blog post we are going to cover writing a bare-bones API in ASP.NET that can read, write, and delete data from a test database. Read on to find out more!

dev
Engineering

Creating a D&D character in Python

7 min read Use our guest blogger’s guide to making a Dungeons and Dragons character using Python. Walking you through each and every stage, you’ll be making your own character by the end of the day!

minecraft
Engineering

A developer’s guide: The differences between SQL and NoSQL

4 min read Choosing the right method to store your data can be a critical decision early in the development process. When deciding on which type of database to choose for your project it really comes down to the data structure you wish to use rather than the specific product or provider. In this blog post, we are going to look at relational and non-relational databases and explore the differences and use cases for both.

dry principle
Engineering

The DRY Principle: What is it and how to apply it

4 min read The DRY principle stands for “Don’t Repeat Yourself” and was first introduced to the masses by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas in the book The Pragmatic Programmer. Find out how you can apply it right now!

statuscake
Engineering

Visual Studio 2019+ Regex Features

3 min read Whether you’ve never heard of regex before, or use it in your code all the time, one thing is almost certain…it is not that easy to read!

Thankfully the Visual Studio team at Microsoft have included several handy features inside the code editor to help using regex a little less painful. Read all about it here.

Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?

Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021

*By providing your email address, you agree to our privacy policy and to receive marketing communications from StatusCake.