dashboard

The first screen I look at every morning

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:

HR Partner Real Time Map.png


HR Partner Real Time Map USA.png

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).