Part of my morning ritual when I wake up and sit down at my iMac nowadays is to open up this particular screen on our SaaS dashboard:

This shows me all the users who are logged on to my HR SaaS application over the past few hours. This screen always gives me pause to think.

I remember when my startup was just in its infancy, and we only had a few dozen users around the world. When I look at this stack of pins in this real time map, I am reminded that this is no longer a side business or just a hobby business any more. We are now providing a real time critical service for people in all corners of the world (at time of writing, 1685 customers in 73 different countries).

It is a sobering thought, and I keep that in the back of my mind when I make any changes to our system now, to be sure that I don’t do anything that will result in downtime or errors.

This is also motivation for me to one day visit a lot of these countries and get to talk to our users face to face!

(BTW, this real time map widget was built using RethinkDB, Segment, MapBox and VueJS - I may do a separate blog post on the technical aspect of building this, which only took a couple of hours).