Original post on blog.redsmin.com

Like any SaaS business, Redsmin has to manage customer payments. To that end, I always use Stripe, an online payment gateway with an awesome developer experience (DX).

1 year after Redsmin’s initial launch, back in December 2014, I also subscribed to Stunning to manage pre-dunning, dunning email and easily set up a page allowing my clients to update their payment details.

However, when I took a look at my fixed expenses over the past 4 years, I noticed that a nonanecdotal part of our fixed expenses were directly allocated to Stunning. As I launch almost one new SaaS business every year, and that Image-Charts’ customers were already asking me to update their credit card information, I had to take action. Either buy another Stunning account or do-what-I-always-do: build from scratch a service that handles it for me… Thus migrating Redsmin from Stunning to this new service written from scratch.

That's how the idea to build a reusable piece of software came to mind: Stripe-update-card was born.

As I'm progressively moving my stack from NodeJS ecosystem to Rust, I had to fix some issues on stripe-rs library. Besides this, everything went fine and the service has been written and deployed on CleverCloud in a day (awesome service, give it a try!). Stripe-update-card on Github, PRs are welcome!

I wanted this microservice to be very simple yet fully customizable to be usable inin many products. It's already used in production at Redsmin, Image-Charts and will be deployed in the coming months on KillBug and GetSignature (but that’s another story).

Stripe-update-card’s form is fully customizable, only 3 environment variables are required to start the service (STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY, STRIPE_SECRET_KEY and SUCCESS_REDIRECT_URL). You can use the others to better promote your brand, product description, logo and so on.

docker run -it \
 -e STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY=pk_test_xxx \
 -e STRIPE_SECRET_KEY=sk_test_xxx \
 -e SUCCESS_REDIRECT_URL=https://url.to.redirect/on/success \
 -p 8080:8080 \
 fgribreau/stripe-update-card

I'm pretty sure other indie/SaaS hackers will find it useful (instead of rewriting it from scratch every time). If so, don't hesitate to reach out and please send a PR to update "Running in production" README section!

I'm copy/pasting here the email sent to RedisWeekly subscribers for archiving purpose.

What a long way since the first issue of RedisWeekly the 16th of August 2013!

As you may have seen from the past weeks, I was not able to send you weekly doses of Redis news! In this regard I decided to leave RedisWeekly in the good hands of Redis Watch curator Itamar Haber from Redis Labs and I would highly recommend you to stick with Redis Watch.

If you do not unsubscribe from this mailing list before the 9th of April you will be automatically subscribed to Redis Watch.

As for me I will continue to share and spread what I find interesting on my Twitter account and hope I will meet some of you at some tech conference!

Thank you for all these years of your trust in RedisWeekly.

Context

Today I received an email on Redsmin Support from @christiankakesa telling me that one of the SSL certificate we use for payments.redsmin.com was expired.

Problem

Indeed the payments website — that we use to recover failed Stripe payments thanks to Bestunning — was unusable with a NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID exception (on Google Chrome). We had not be notified automatically, I had not been notified automatically, it goes against everything I stand for and we had to fix this.

Solution

We already use Jenkins for a lot of things at Redsmin/Bringr (and now iAdvize) and it knows how to run jobs daily to check multiple things. Why not using it to verify SSL certificates validity as well?

So create a new jenkins job, configure it to be built daily (or even hourly) and run the shell script above:

Don't forget to configure email notifications in case of unstable build and you're done! Next time something's wrong with your website or app SSL certificate you will be notified.

This week I gave a talk on Redis at the third Human Talks Nantes.

I find it kind of sad that each Human Talk is limited to 10 minutes. I know it's a way to discover many technologies rapidly but I see this kind of talks more like 24h news. In 10 minutes we simply don't have the time to go deeper into the subject, leaving sometimes the audience on false belief. Hopefully and exceptionally we were allowed to stay more time on stage. So with the Q&A included I was able to talk about Redis for 30 minutes and tackle deeper subjects like how Redis replication algorithm works, how to use Redis as a LRU cache, how Redis failover works with Sentinel and so on.

Everything went smoothly I will surely give another talk on Redis and it will be way more practical this time!

In the last weeks we received a lot of useful feedbacks from our users so we would like to thank you all for that! We are working hard on Redsmin and started to think technically about Redsmin Enterprise thanks to the deep knowledge of linux hackers like @keruspe.
The following weeks are going to be really exciting, stay tuned and don’t forget to come say hi!

I can't say how much I'm excited by InfluxDB right now. For months I was looking for an alternative to the hard to scale RRDTool and Whisper projects and was even thinking to implement my own distributed time-series database. And then the guys at Errplane released InfluxDB.

InfluxDB is announced to be production ready before January but I wanted to play around with it already. Just to see with my own eyes if it was filling the gap for my use case at Redsmin. The client libraries are really new. The NodeJS client is only 1 day old as I'm writing this.

So as I tested InfluxDB against Redsmin monitoring service, I was looking for a way to write and execute InfluxDB SQL queries rapidly and display the results inside the terminal. Since InfluxDB, due to its maturity, lacks of tools, I decided to create my own InfluxDB-CLI.

InfluxDB and InfluxDB-CLI have a long way to go before being production ready but I really hope it will help newcomers discover and use this amazing project.

A little more than one year ago, I took the challenge to write a modern real-time Redis GUI in order to improve my workflow with Redis and to help me write, debug and monitor my Redis servers at Bringr, a real-time monitoring and publishing solution for creating value from social media activity.
Redsmin now helps daily thousands of developers around the world speeding up their workflow.