Yonas Beshawred

Using Screenhero via Slack was getting to be pretty horrible. Video and sound quality was often times pretty bad and worst of all the service just wasn't reliable. We all had high hopes when the acquisition went through but ultimately, the product just didn't live up to expectations. We ended up trying Zoom after I had heard about it from some friends at other companies. We noticed the video/sound quality was better, and more importantly it was super reliable. The Slack integration was awesome (just type /zoom and it starts a call)

You can schedule recurring calls which is helpful. There's a G Suite (Google Calendar) integration which lets you add a Zoom call (w/dial in info + link to web/mobile) with the click of a button.

Meeting recordings (video and audio) are really nice, you get recordings stored in the cloud on the higher tier plans. One of our engineers, Jerome, actually built a cool little Slack integration using the Slack API and Zoom API so that every time a recording is processed, a link gets posted to the "event-recordings" channel. The iOS app is great too!

#WebAndVideoConferencing #videochat

One of the challenges we've had to deal with as our product surface area has grown, is identifying and reproducing bugs. We use Sentry for exception monitoring, however, it's usually difficult to try to reproduce bugs. I first heard about FullStory from our friends over at Flexport (check out the Stack Story and you'll hear them mention it: https://stackshare.io/posts/how-flexport-builds-software-to-move-over-1-billion-dollars-in-merchandise). FullStory let's you record user sessions, and play them back to help you identify bugs and UX issues. You're even able to view the console errors live as they happen during the sessions!

We were pretty blown away at how comprehensive the product was at first, and it seems to be getting better every time I use it. Only complaint is that it's super expensive once you're in the hundreds of thousands of sessions so we had to stop trying to record logged out sessions, we only use it for auth'd sessions. We also started out using it via Segment but once we needed to watch out for the number of sessions we were recording we realized that it was impossible to restrict FullStory recordings on a per-page basis without ripping it out of Segment, so we ended up just using their JS snippet and putting that in the Rails views that we wanted to monitor closely.

The ability to share specific portions of sessions, speed them up, skip inactivity, and all sorts of other little features all add up to a really solid product that helps both our PMs and engineers improve our own product much quicker. I officially requested a Sentry + FullStory integration a while back https://twitter.com/yonasbe/status/871987738777616384, still waiting on this! #UserFeedbackAsAService #reproducing-bugs #sessionrecording #bug-squashing

We decided to use MemCachier as our Memcached provider because we were seeing some serious PostgreSQL performance issues with query-heavy pages on the site. We use MemCachier for all Rails caching and pretty aggressively too for the logged out experience (fully cached pages for the most part). We really need to move to Amazon ElastiCache as soon as possible so we can stop paying so much. The only reason we're not moving is because there are some restrictions on the network side due to our main app being hosted on Heroku.

#Caching #RailsCaching

We've been using Stripe for a while to charge our customers (mostly for the ads you see on StackShare), but we only recently realized that you can actually invoice and charge customers all through Stripe's UI 😱

You just need a customer's email address, then you add them as a customer and create a new invoice and send it to the customer- all via the Stripe dashboard. The customer then gets an email with a link to the pay the invoice (via credit card, ACH, or wire transfer). Once the customer clicks the link in the email to pay they're taken to a page hosted at pay.stripe.com where they can download a PDF of the invoice and pay via credit card, or ACH/wire transfer.

Nevermind the fact that we built an entire Rails app to do all this 😒 We'll be sunsetting our payments app soon. I wish someone had told us about these features sooner! I doubt they had this when we first built the app but we could have stopped using/maintaining the app a while ago. Stripe is amazing. That is all.

#invoicing #payments

Adopting Amplitude was one of the best decisions we've made. We didn't try any of the alternatives- the free tier was really generous so it was easy to justify trying it out (via Segment). We've had Google Analytics since inception, but just for logged out traffic. We knew we'd need some sort of #FunnelAnalysisAnalytics solution, so it came down to just a few solutions.

We had heard good things about Amplitude from friends and even had a consultant/advisor who was an Amplitude pro from using it as his company, so he kinda convinced us to splurge on the Enterprise tier for the behavioral cohorts alone. Writing the queries they provide via a few clicks in their UI would take days/weeks to craft in SQL. The behavioral cohorts allow us to create a lot of useful retention charts.

Another really useful feature is kinda minor but kinda not. When you change a saved chart, a new URL gets generated and is visible in your browser (chartURL/edit) and that URL is immediately available to share with your team. It may sound inconsequential, but in practice, it makes it really easy to share and iterate on graphs. Only complaint is that you have to explicitly tag other team members as owners of whatever chart you're creating for them to be able to edit it and save it. I can see why this is the case, but more often than not, the people I'm sharing the chart with are the ones I want to edit it 🤷🏾‍♂️

The Engagement Matrix feature is also really helpful (once you filter out the noisy events). Charts and dashboards are also great and make it easy for us to focus on the important metrics. We've been using Amplitude in production for about 6 months now. There's a bunch of other features we don't use regularly like Pathfinder, etc that I personally don't fully understand yet but I'm sure we'll start using them eventually.

Again, haven't tried any of the alternatives like Heap, Mixpanel, or Kissmetrics so can't speak to those, but Amplitude works great for us.

#analytics analyticsstack

Recently we started using 1Password for the shared vault feature (shared passwords were getting a bit too difficult to manage as env variables on Heroku). We were also sending around passes in Slack which is probably a really bad idea. Once we started using our shared vault, I realized how late we are to the 1pass party! I've started using 1Password for all of my company accounts as well as for all new services we adopt as a team. The Mac and iPhone app and Chrome extension are really slick. #PasswordManagement

We're using ReadMe.io for our public API (which has been in closed Beta forever), you can see the docs here: https://docs.stackshare.io. They've got all the stuff you'd expect: custom domain support, lots of integrations, etc.

The design looks great and having the actual JSON responses on the right side panel is really nice. My favorite feature is the API Explorer which allows you to test out real API calls once you've entered a key.

We haven't really promoted the API since we're not opening up access just yet, but once we do I know ReadMe's got us covered!

With Segment (using a single code snippet), you can definitely integrate Intercom, Amplitude, and a lot of other tools including Google Analytics. We've used all 3 of those integrations before at StackShare. Full list of their integrations here and here :)

So we started out with a service called Adminium, it was really useful. But when we hit the table limit, we realized we were paying for something we could easily get for free. My friend Cyrus suggested RailsAdmin, so we made the switch. I like RailsAdmin because almost everything works without any configuration. It’s basically a UI for your PG db. We use it to debug issues and update content. RailsAdmin