Sustainability Articles

We are unlikely to add additional language support to TrackJS. And it's not just because of our name!

Learn from our mistakes: be careful when using VC funded companies as vendors or important parts of your stack.

Unprofitable companies, like Flexport and Splunk, are a risk for their customers because they can radically change or close down entirely. What about TrackJS?

During COVID-19, TrackJS extends their trial from 14 to 60 days for free JavaScript error monitoring while developers work from home. As a fully remote company, they're offering their Request Metrics development videos on YouTube to help isolated developers feel connected to a team during quarant...

Developers often undervalue their time, saying "I could build that" about tools like TrackJS. With web developers earning $56-1500/hour, building your own monitoring tool costs $9,000+ in time for a worse version of a $100 product. Focus your precious 2,150 working weeks on creating real value, n...

Separate your monitoring from your primary infrastructure to avoid dangerous blind spots. Cloud providers' internal monitoring fails when their infrastructure fails, leaving you debugging outages without visibility. TrackJS hosts on dedicated hardware separate from major cloud providers for true ...

A fictional tale exposing the anti-developer nature of metered logging: Sarah gets locked out of LogCorp during a critical outage because adding debugging logs pushed them over quota, forcing an emergency upgrade during crisis. TrackJS rejects this model, pricing by site traffic instead of error ...

The event-stream NPM malware incident exposes JavaScript's dependency crisis: 418 packages for a simple React app versus 40 for a massive .NET application. The culture of micropackages, automatic upgrades with ^ operators, and anonymous maintainers creates security nightmares compared to vendorin...

Small teams outperform large ones through better communication, shared incentives, and forced prioritization. Growing employees creates expensive overhead and specialized silos. Success isn't about headcount - it's about building sustainable, profitable products with minimal maintenance needs.

Real business value comes from choosing boring, proven technology over exciting new frameworks. The best code is no code - sometimes waiting solves problems automatically. Every line written has maintenance costs, so prioritize shipping features over perfect abstractions and endless refactoring.

UI component libraries sound perfect for large teams but become nightmares of competing requirements, compatibility issues, and feature bloat. Skip the complexity - use documented style guides with colors and fonts instead. Developers love spending 40 hours on "fun" work to avoid 20 minutes of bo...

Frontend development has become needlessly complex with frameworks requiring massive toolchains for apps destined to be rewritten every 2-3 years. Instead of building cathedrals, focus on speed-to-market with simpler solutions that deliver value quickly.

Eric Brandes argues modern JavaScript frameworks abandon backwards compatibility unlike the web's foundational success. While jQuery maintains stable APIs for years, Angular breaks compatibility every 6 months, creating developer fatigue and wasted money on constant upgrades.

Learn from GitLab's outage by making production environments visually obvious. TrackJS shares Ansible snippets to turn Linux command prompts and Windows UI chrome bright red in production, preventing dangerous "wrong server" mistakes.

External JavaScript loading can fail catastrophically, breaking functionality and user experience. Learn why mobile networks cause third-party script failures and discover simple defensive coding techniques to gracefully handle missing dependencies and protect your applications.