Tag (4)
cron
- Field Report // NO. 028
How I built a flight monitor that watched my actual flight
A departure board tells you a flight is delayed and never tells you whether to worry. I built a self-terminating monitor that watched my flight through a storm-delayed evening at JFK, stayed silent until it mattered, delivered once at wheels-up and deleted its own cron. Here is the reproducible pattern.
- Field Report // NO. 023
Shipment tracking from forwarded emails
Carrier tracking pages work for humans and fight servers. I forward shipping emails to my agent; one silent hourly cron polls a registry until a parcel is delivered, pings me once, and files the pickup task. The reproducible pattern, including the carriers that cannot be polled and the nudge that covers them.
- Mission Briefing // NO. 021
A transfer-news briefing that runs itself
A daily transfer briefing that nags is worse than none. I built a Sunderland news roundup that runs at 08:00 every day, delivers only when something is genuinely new, and stays completely silent otherwise. The trick is a hard split: a deterministic script owns the mechanics, and the language model only formats.
- Tradecraft // NO. 016
The .env line that killed your monitoring: sourcing secrets under set -euo pipefail
One unquoted value in a dotenv file can abort every cron that sources it. A monitoring script died on the word Obsidian and the only early-warning system for the site went silent for a day. Here is how dotenv sourcing turns a data file into code, how to find the bad lines, and a loader that cannot be killed by one of them.