HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

liqiug

1 karma · joined September 18, 2026

Software engineer with 20+ years of experience specializing in .NET / C# full-stack development and resilient infrastructure.

Currently building Doyouok (https://doyouok.com) — a lightweight, agent-free heartbeat monitor built on .NET Core & PostgreSQL.

submissionscomments
liqiug··on Doyouok – Agent-free heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs and workflows
Hi HN, A bit more context on why I built this:

The basic idea isn't new — there are already good cron/heartbeat monitoring services out there. I wanted something very small and simple: create a check, get a URL, and make one HTTP request when the job succeeds.

The part I’ve been particularly interested in is reliability. Doyouok currently runs across two servers behind a network load balancer, with PostgreSQL, so I’ve been using it as a small real-world exercise in designing and testing a highly available .NET service.

I’m also trying to keep the product focused rather than turning it into a full observability platform.

One small feature I find useful myself: Doyouok keeps a check-in trend chart, so you can quickly see whether a job or workflow has been running consistently over time, rather than only knowing when it failed.

I’d be interested to hear whether people find this kind of history useful, or if there are other things you’d want to see in the check history.

If you use cron jobs, background workers, n8n/Make/Zapier, or similar automation, I’d be especially interested in what you currently use and what you wish these services did better. I’m still looking for ideas from real users.

liqiug··on How to Write with an LLM
I mostly use LLMs for coding, so this is an interesting use case. I’m curious how long an article it can handle in practice before the context starts becoming an issue.