DEV Community: İlyas Özkurt

Why I Built Another Uptime Monitoring Tool as a Solo Developer

İlyas Özkurt — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:17:25 +0000

There are already many uptime monitoring tools on the market.

Some are powerful. Some are mature. Some offer almost every feature you can imagine.

So naturally, one question comes first:

Why build another one?

For me, the answer started with a simple frustration.

Over time, I noticed that many monitoring products were growing in complexity faster than in clarity.
A user often needs only a few things:

know when a service is down
understand what failed
receive alerts quickly
avoid false alarms

Yet many dashboards feel overloaded before you even create your first monitor.

As someone who has spent years building software products, I wanted a monitoring tool that stays technically capable while remaining clean and understandable.

That is how UptimeTick started.

The Problem I Wanted to Solve

The biggest issue was not checking whether a website responds.

That part is simple.

The real challenge is deciding whether a failure is real.

A single failed request does not always mean downtime.

It may be:

temporary packet loss
DNS delay
regional routing issue
a slow backend response
a short CDN hiccup

If alerts trigger too early, trust drops quickly.

That is why I focused heavily on retry logic and signal quality.

How I Designed the Monitoring Flow

Each check goes through a decision process before creating an incident.

A failed request does not immediately become downtime.

Instead:

retries happen automatically
response times are measured
status history is evaluated
health transitions are controlled carefully

This reduces false positives significantly.

In practice, this matters more than adding dozens of extra features.

Infrastructure Choices

The backend uses a distributed architecture designed for lightweight but scalable checks.

Core parts include:

Laravel queues
isolated check jobs
cloud-based execution layers
custom response handling

For HTTP checks, I also needed consistent request identity, so requests use a dedicated monitoring user agent.

That sounds small, but it helps with transparency and filtering.

Why Simplicity Matters More Than Feature Count

A lot of products compete by adding more options.

I tried to think differently:

What if fewer decisions create a better product?

That means:

clear monitor creation
readable incidents
understandable alerting
no unnecessary noise

Especially for solo founders and small teams, clarity often wins.

Building as a Solo Developer

One advantage of building alone is speed.

One disadvantage is that every decision belongs to you.

Infrastructure, UX, alerts, pricing logic, mobile behavior, failure handling — everything moves through the same brain.

That creates pressure, but it also keeps product decisions very consistent.

What I Learned

Monitoring is not only a technical problem.

It is also a trust problem.

Users must believe alerts are meaningful.

If the signal feels unreliable, even the best infrastructure loses value.

That lesson shaped almost every decision I made.

Still Improving

The product continues evolving.

Some improvements happen in infrastructure.

Some happen in interface details.

Some happen because users interact differently than expected.

That feedback loop is one of the best parts of building publicly.

If you use monitoring tools regularly, I would genuinely like to hear:

What is the one thing most uptime monitoring tools still get wrong?

I Built Offday.app — A Small Tool That Helps You Plan Longer Holidays with Fewer Leave Days

İlyas Özkurt — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 22:05:11 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with side projects for years, usually to solve small personal problems. Offday.app started exactly like that: a tiny tool I needed for myself, but it gradually turned into something people from many countries began using. So I thought it might be worth sharing here.

The Problem I Wanted to Solve

Every year, I try to maximize my holidays by combining annual leave with public holidays. Doing this manually is tedious: checking calendars, calculating date ranges, and tryinga to see which combinations create the longest break.

The idea behind Offday.app is straightforward:

Select your country → the app analyzes that year’s public holidays → it suggests date ranges where a few leave days turn into surprisingly long holidays.

It’s simple, but it saves a lot of time and catches opportunities you probably wouldn’t notice.

Global Usage

I initially built it only for Turkey. After refining the holiday logic, I made it work for every country. Since then, users from more than 50 countries have generated hundreds of holiday plans, even though I barely promoted it.

Tech Stack

Since this is dev.to, here’s what’s under the hood:

Frontend: Vue 3, Vite, Tailwind
Backend: Laravel
Infrastructure: AWS (CloudFront, S3, EC2)
Logic: holiday parsing, date-range scoring, caching, multi-locale output

The date engine doesn’t brute-force all combinations. Instead, it focuses on identifying “peak opportunity windows” around existing public holidays.

Why I’m Sharing It

I enjoy seeing other developers’ weekend projects here, so I wanted to contribute mine. Offday.app is simple, but it genuinely solves a small, real problem. If it helps someone squeeze a few extra days into their next holiday, that’s more than enough motivation for me.

You can try it here:

https://offday.app

I’m currently working on improvements such as:

plan sharing without accounts
exportable holiday cards
more detailed country-specific rules
better UX for country selection and date review

If you have suggestions or feedback, I’d be happy to hear them.

Turkish Food Recipe Scraper

İlyas Özkurt — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 07:18:39 +0000

Turkish Food Recipes

A scrapper allows you to scrape 20000+ Turkish food recipes and export them to JSON files.

How to install and use Scrapper?

git clone https://github.com/ilyasozkurt/turkish-food-recipes && cd turkish-food-recipes/scrapper
composer install
php artisan scrape:recipes --force-download

The --force-download option downloads all sitemaps instead of reading from the cache.

How to use the dataset?

After you run the command php artisan scrape:recipes --force-download you'll be able to see /data/ directory at the root of the project.

The dataset is in JSON format.

Enjoy!

Automobile Manufacturers, Models, And Specs Database

İlyas Özkurt — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 21:13:17 +0000

A database which includes automobile manufacturers, models and engine options with specs.

How to install and use Scrapper?

git clone https://github.com/ilyasozkurt/automobile-models-and-specs && cd automobile-models-and-specs
composer install
Get a copy of .env.example and save it as .env after configuring database variables.
php artisan migrate
php artisan scrape:automobiles

Data Information

119 Brand
6681 Model
28400~ Model Option (Engine)

Brand Specs

Name
Logo

Model Specs

Brand
Name
Description
Press Release
Photos

Engine Specs

Name
Engine -> Cylinders
Engine -> Displacement
Engine -> Power
Engine -> Torque
Engine -> Fuel System
Engine -> Fuel
Engine -> CO2 Emissions
Performance -> Top Speed
Performance -> Acceleration 0-62 Mph (0-100 kph)
Fuel Economy -> City
Fuel Economy -> Highway
Fuel Economy -> Combined
Drive Type
Gearbox
Brakes -> Front
Brakes -> Rear
Tire Size
Dimensions -> Length
Dimensions -> Width
Dimensions -> Height
Dimensions -> Front/rear Track
Dimensions -> Wheelbase
Dimensions -> Ground Clearance
Dimensions -> Cargo Volume
Dimensions -> Cd
Weight -> Unladen
Weight -> Gross Weight Limit

Thank you.