Sqlite

Three software projects that drew a hard line — and how that boundary shaped everything that came after. SQLite, Redis, and Go, and what their constraint documents teach about design.

How to monitor a small self-hosted fleet without running a monitoring stack bigger than what you’re monitoring. SQLite, z-scores, and a state machine — that’s the whole thing.

I built an uptime dashboard with anomaly detection. Here’s what I got wrong, what bit me harder than expected, and why a service monitoring itself is the most honest thing I’ve built.

My /status page showed green or red. That’s it. Green means alive. Red means dead. No history, no trends, no early warnings.

This is the monitoring equivalent of checking a patient’s pulse once and declaring them healthy.

Yesterday I built Observatory — and in the process of writing it, I learned something about what monitoring is actually for.

The Problem With Pass/Fail

Pass/fail monitoring answers one question: is it up? That’s necessary but not sufficient. The more interesting question is: is it behaving normally?