Marketing isn't easy, especially at the beginning. In this article I'll share how I prepared for launching a Google Ads campaign and the results of the first week including the tweaks I made based on that.

The weather is getting colder which makes the perfect time to make the uptime monitoring of my open source monitoring tool more reliable. In this article, I’ll walk you through how I designed the architecture for multi-location monitoring, how I implemented it and how to host it yourself.

As a backend developer my strongest point really isn't design and UX. I always envy people who are good at this as it's an amazing thing to be good at. The last few months I've had feedback, learned a lot and redesigned Vigilant's homepage a few times.

Vim gives developers an extra dimension when editing and navigating code. It's another way of thinking when writing code. I've been using Vim for the past 2.5 years and the experience of using Vim makes programming a lot more fun.

If you run a serious website, you need to know when it’s down. Uptime monitoring helps with that, but it only tells part of the story. Just because your homepage returns a 200 OK doesn’t mean your users can log in, check out, or even access critical features. There are many tools that monitor uptime but when you are just monitoring uptime there can still be other issues present.

A while ago I saw a message in a Slack channel that I'm in about someone that is building a tool to do security / code quality checks on PHP projects. He wanted a codebase to test his tool so I offered Vigilant.
I've received a detailed report on the code quality and security of Vigilant, in this post I'll share the report.

In this article I'd like to share how I've setup the codebase for Vigilant, an open source web monitoring application. Vigilant is designed to be an all-in-one solution for monitoring a website, that means from uptime to certificates to CVE's. I wanted to keep the codebase clean and split each of these parts so that it does not become one big mess.

Vigilant has reached 100 stars after 15 months on Github 🎉
In this article I share the road towards 100 stars.

When working with Laravel Horizon, it’s easy to get started, run php artisan horizon, dispatch some jobs, monitor them in the dashboard, and you’re good to go. But as your application scales and the amount of jobs grow more complex, subtle issues begin to surface. The design of your jobs and configuration of Horizon and Redis must be correct in order to run Horizon without issues.

Unique jobs are great for ensuring that a job is never dispatched twice, but when misconfigured it can cause strange issues such as your job not dispatching. Most jobs in Vigilant are unique, for example, the uptime monitor dispatches a job at a specified interval but if for any reason the job hasn't executed within that interval I do not want another job on the queue.

But they can be tricky, there are a few things that can cause them to break.

When your SSL certificate expires, things break.

Browsers throw up scary warnings. APIs stop talking to each other. Your users bounce. And unless you’re actively tracking expiration dates, it’s easy to miss.

Certificate Monitoring is a new Vigilant feature that makes sure that never happens.

I've recently tagged the first version of Vigilant, 2025.4. As you can see it is not a traditional SemVer number like 0.1 or 1.0.
In this article I'd like to share the reason why I've chosen calendar versioning instead of the more traditional semver.

It's been more than a year since I made the first commit for Vigilant and today I'm tagging the first release.
Vigilant is an open source web monitoring application that strives to monitor all aspect of a modern website.
By all aspects I mean from uptime to DNS to Lighthouse scores. At the current state of the project Vigilant contains about half of the features that I'd like in it. Some missing features are status pages, sitemap monitoring and a CRON monitor.

In this article I will talk about the steps I took to get from an idea to the first version.

Singletons are a great feature of Laravel's service container but users of the framework must be aware that context aware singletons can lead to unexpected behaviour in an application when using long living processes.

Deploying a Laravel application can be difficult for those who don't have experience with PHP applications. Docker is the solution to easily publish and let other people deploy your application without them needing to learn how it is exactly setup. In this article I will show how I've Dockerized Vigilant.

The past few months I've worked on getting Vigilant stable and self-hostable. The application now has three monitoring features and is ready to be self hosted using Docker. This means that everyone can start playing with Vigilant!

Vigilant is an open source technical monitoring application for websites and web applications.
It will monitor different aspects of your website in order to ensure that your site is running great.
When any of these monitors detect a change it will notify you through a flexible notification system.