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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

I’ll give credit where it’s due, Dead Mans Snitch inspired us to build Cronitor, but I’m pretty sure this is in maintenance mode.

It’s a great proof of concept that something like this should exist that gives developers observability for their cron jobs and background tasks but they seemed to have stopped working on it, so we started in 2014 and have shipped about every week since.

Ultimately, we believe you can’t trust software you can’t see. Background jobs are like the cities underground - absolutely essential to survival and easy to forget about as you move around on the surface getting things done.

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Lead developer behind Dead Man’s Snitch here :wave:

We are definitely not in “maintenance mode” and have a lot of things in the works. With the last couple of years being what they’ve been things have often taken longer than we’d like but they’re certainly in motion.

edit: fixed tpyo

> Lead developer behind Dead Man’s Snitch here :wave:

Class! ;)

Great to hear. Have used Dead Man's Snitch in the past and plan to do so again in the future.

Their app was last released 5 months ago and the change log says they are working on adding new features.

I think maybe simple and working is sometimes Good Enough™ and you don’t need weekly updates to prove a project is still alive.

I’m just calling it how i see it. 5 months ago and before that? 4 years. That’s maintenance mode.

Besides, you are talking about the app, with this kind of saas, the app doesn’t really matter.

Simple and reliable take a surprising amount of time to get right. We would rather move slowly and cautiously because we have thousands of operations folks who could have a really bad time if we rush something that causes folks to get paged at 2am or lose trust in the system.

Also, we’re bad at talking about the work we do. It’s the classic trap a lot of engineering founders fall into.

I wish y'all would own the terraform provider directly. It seems to have lagged behind.

Thanks for letting me know. We can prioritize that.

We took over most of the open source SDKs last year and then all of a sudden felt the burden of 5 new codebases so we cooled it for a bit.

This year we have been rolling out deeper SDKs with auto provisioning that in some cases might eliminate the need for terraform - Eg k8s, sidekiq, airflow and celery

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