June 2021 Summaries

Checkly has secured a $10M Series A round led by CRV, joined by existing investors Accel, Mango Capital and Guillermo Rauch. This investment will enable the company to focus on its goal of building the best monitoring and E2E-testing platform for developers. Checkly has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 2020, transforming from a bootstrapped startup to a platform used by hundreds of customers. The team has achieved significant milestones, including crossing the 1 billion check runs milestone, with customers like 1Password and Vercel leveraging the platform for their delivery pipelines. Checkly aims to become the #1 reliability automation platform for developers, embracing its core values of talking to customers and shipping features. The company plans to introduce a unified workflow, extensive debugging capabilities, and enhancements to its platform features. With this investment, Checkly is poised to bring developers the simplest and most powerful workflow to ensure their web apps and APIs work reliably and fast.

The new browser check creation experience is built around an upgraded text editor powered by the Monaco editor from Microsoft, which also powers VS Code under the hood. This post will cover some of the challenges faced while building this modern code editing experience in the browser, including extending JavaScript with a custom language, custom highlighting, and custom code completion. The original browser check experience was based on Code Mirror, but it caused issues due to its long length and forced users to do excessive scrolling and context switching. To address these issues, the new experience hides secondary settings sections and moves them into a drawer component, leaving only the editor itself, run summary/results section, and fold-open logs section visible. The Monaco editor allows for custom syntax highlighting, which was achieved by creating an entirely custom language feature and bolted it onto the built-in JavaScript language definitions and handlers in Monaco. Additionally, custom completion options were added to support Handlebars partials, including autocompletion of partial prefixes and hover for content. Typescript and autocomplete features were also integrated into the new experience. The development process was challenging but ultimately successful, with all major issues resolved before the initial release date of June 1st.