In the attempt of turning challenges into strengths, we take the opportunity to share the lessons we learned from the incident we recently suffered, that kept our authentication service unavailable for a few hours. This event, while disruptive, provided us with valuable insights and a clear path toward strengthening our systems and practices. In this post, we aim to share the lessons learned and the steps we are taking to enhance our resilience against future attacks.

Toggl Track has been evolving on top of a monolithic PostgreSQL database. However, we long struggled to serve OLAP usages of our data - meaning, our reporting features - while keeping the natural OLTP shape of our database. We strive daily to provide better reporting capabilities to our users, reporting over more data, with more insights, transformations, well... more of everything. But all of these reports were still running on top of our normalized data structure, on our transactional database.

Long story short, we long noticed the need to move, hydrate, and transform our transactional data into something with report-friendly structures, and that became harder and harder to ignore.

We're thrilled to announce the launch of our new engineering blog, a dedicated space for sharing insights, challenges, and triumphs from our engineering team.