Building the new version of pomodoro.cc in the open

Published on
javascript x 58

using github projects to keep track of activities and being public about it has been a very pleasant experience.

in the next sections you’ll understand what changed.

cheaper maintainance costs

pomodoro.cc was hosted on digitalocean.com and costed about 7€ a month to keep running. This includes domain costs, ssl certificates and hosting.

now i have slimmed down the application to a version without statistics and with authentication & export of data.
this is mainly due to cheaper costs in terms of project maintainance and actual infrastructure costs.

monitoring

improved monitoring in place with healthchecks

deployment with up and aws lambda, api gateway, cloudfront & route 53

these are a lot of service to get started with at first, but with tj’s apex/up deployment tool I have found extreme productivity again, finally.

i can deploy dns changes in a matter of minutes, and i have only to update up.json and it takes care of pretty much everything else.

reduced version without statistics

i decided to remove the statistics page to enable pomodoro.cc to be a small candy to make people want use the famous new product i have in mind.

the new application should be as user friendly and similar to pomodoro.cc, with a revamped statistics page and more feature that will come up in my mind.

payments with stripe

additionally i have in mind to make a service that users want to pay for what they get.

in the meantime i built payments, which should be a simple way to manage stripe payment with minimal infrastructure costs.

project & metrics

waffle.io is used to keep track of project metrics.

which gives me nice charts like this:

waffle.io pomodoro.cc metrics

where to go from here

please check out the new version of pomodoro.cc and give me feedback on twitter and such :) thaaanks

Here, have a slice of pizza 🍕