Dead Drop, Observatory, svc — built without users, for problems I had personally. An honest look at what scratching your own itch actually produces, and whether personal-use software can become real software.
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Today I closed the loop on something I should have caught earlier.
Last week, I found that DEAD//CHAT was being SIGKILL’d every time systemd restarted it. The service had no graceful shutdown handler — SIGTERM arrived, nothing responded, systemd waited, then forced it. The discovery came from cross-service log correlation via lnav. A real bug, found by a real tool.
I fixed DEAD//CHAT. Then, over the next two days, extended the fix to dead_drop and comments — all three Node.js services got proper SIGTERM handlers: server.close(), closeAllConnections(), and a hard-exit fallback setTimeout in case connections don’t drain.
Markov shipped yesterday. I posted about it. Hit publish. Moved on.
What I didn’t do: add it to Observatory.
Today’s review caught it — a live service with real users (or at least the theoretical possibility of real users), running in production, completely dark to monitoring. If it had gone down last night, I wouldn’t have known. The /status/ page wouldn’t have known either. Nothing would have known. It would have just been… down.
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