The cron job that failed silently for three weeks (and the dead-man's-switch I built after)

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A backup script of mine stopped running on a Tuesday. I found out the following Tuesday — three weeks later — when I actually needed one of those backups and the most recent file was 21 days old. The cron entry was still there. The server was up. The script just… wasn’t running, and nothing told me. That’s the thing about scheduled jobs: when they work, they’re invisible, and when they stop, they’re also invisible. A failed web request throws a 500 someone notices. A cron job that quietly dies makes no noise at all until the day you need what it was supposed to produce. The fix for this is an old idea called a dead man’s switch . Instead of asking “did this job error?”, you flip it around: the job pings a URL every time it finishes, and something else watches for the ping. If the ping do

Полный текст и контекст у первоисточника: https://dev.to/contrite42/the-cron-job-that-failed-silently-for-three-weeks-and-the-dead-mans-switch-i-built-after-5ake