Prefab
10x Better Logging, Feature Flags, Config
If you've built something and you want eyeballs on it. If you're like me, you've built it and launched it and... well, build it and they will come doesn't always work right away.
So, yeah, ads. Do they work? How much do they cost? There isn't a ton of data, so I thought "why not share".
Context: we've got this neat feature at prefab that turns on logging instantly – it's something a lot of folks don't even know they need until they see it in action. The challenge? Not many people are searching for this kind of thing. So the goal here has been really just high level evaluation of different messages.
So Reddit ads. The analytics are basic, and yeah, i'm not sure about click quality. But what was cool was seeing real talk from real users. They'll call you out if your ad's not up to snuff, which is great for honest feedback.
I put the raw data in an artifact on Reforge https://www.reforge.com/artifacts/analysis-of-reddit-ad-performance-at-prefab which is free, but you do need to sign up.
I found https://soapbox.wistia.com/ and I think I'm gonna try to make a whole series of videos like https://blog.prefab.cloud/blog/feature-flags-for-ruby-on-rails-in-6-minutes-with-manifold to help me explain Prefab.Cloud. Somehow video is easier to produce than trying to wordsmith a blog post.
I'm curious whether people like watching videos. Myself I often don't like videos because I don't have headphones in, but I have a feeling I'm a minority opinion here.
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I personally like to watch programming tutorials in the form of videos BUT only if they are on point. I don't want to spent 40 minutes on a video when I can read a blog posts that takes me 10 minutes to do the same.
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Same thought. Gonna plan to keep em short.
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I often find video to be very helpful for me to grasp most new tech related subjects. I might dive deeper with a book later, but video is usually when I get to see the big picture and make the decision where and how to dive deeper to more specifics.
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I like watch tutorials 🤓
I put together a little video showing how to add Feature flags to a rails app. I think I'm going to try to do more content like this. It seems like a cool way to quickly put together an explanation.
https://blog.prefab.cloud/blog/feature-flags-for-ruby-on-rails-in-6-minutes-with-manifold
Launched a free tier for https://www.prefab.cloud This was a huge undertaking, but I'm really hopeful that it gets people over the hump of trying something new. imho The services Prefab provides are things that everyone should have, whether or not they're paying.
We came out of the gate with only a Ruby client, but now officially have a https://github.com/prefab-cloud/prefab-cloud-java client as well. Unfortunately customers do seem to want a bit of everything, C#, PHP, Node being the three that have been requested and I don't have experience in.
FeatureFlags got way more traction and interest than our original RateLimits. Decided that the ratelim.it domain name was fun, but was too confusing for a service that does a number of different things.
Re-launched as https://www.prefab.cloud
Needed to switch over from writing directly to DynamoDB to an async process that went through Kinesis. Wanted to do that with FeatureFlags so built them out... and made them our second feature.
We originally launched in 2016 as ratelim.it. "Rate Limits as a Service". This scratched a very specific itch I had where I needed idempotency as a service at my day job.
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