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Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

blog.cronhub.io

31–40 of 50 posts

Re: Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

#31
post #30

> It's built for developers who don't like managing servers and working with cron jobs. I had a hard time understanding the target market. Are they referring to frontend developers who are forced to do backend work?

Programmers are not sysadmins are not network engineers are not tech support are not DBAs are not ...

Increasingly, people in one area are expected to take on the responsibilities of other areas. This invariably ends up in disaster the moment you've scaled past the point that inexperienced person can go. Not because that person doesn't have good intentions, or ability to read manuals, but because some things you only learn by doing the hard way.

DevOps tries to turn developers into sysadmins. Sysadmins make fantastic scripts to manage their servers. Developers make fantastic programs. The skills are similar but ultimately very different, the problem domains are very different, and the thought processes required are very different.

"Oh I can just copypasta this from stackoverflow" is a terrible way to develop or administer systems. The danger is squared when it's the area you care less about, as you have even less chance of detecting when you're doing it wrong.

Alas, business needs don't allow for the right thing to be done from the start, which is reasonable as the money needs to go on generating more money and fast.

Which is why every business has technical debt, always and forever, and overpaid consultants will always have jobs pointing out where the problems are for other people to fix.

Re: Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

#32

Slick landing page design, well done and congrats on your hard work. As others have said the market is saturated and engineers would implement this themselves. Don't let that deter you, though, there's still room for innovation. If you can get user feedback I'm sure you can find a niche or killer feature that makes your product worth paying for. For me, I have two things I'd like to see in a paid service: 1. Allow sc…

Your approach on providing feedback is clean, to the point, and most importantly, encouraging. Well done, Zachary.

Re: Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

#33
post #30

> It's built for developers who don't like managing servers and working with cron jobs. I had a hard time understanding the target market. Are they referring to frontend developers who are forced to do backend work?

Many web backends are deployed to platform-managed runtime-specific container environments. The idle Linux monolith is becoming less common. In these environments, it’s often easier to set up a cron webhook endpoint than to write a DIY task scheduler.

That said, most deployment platforms have their own task scheduler systems. And https://cron-job.org/en/ does this for free. So, I understand the market but I don’t understand why anyone would pay for this.

But cheers & best of luck to the maker!

Re: Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

#34

Unfortunately, it's still missing the main cron-killer feature: randomized intervals. I have 200 servers that I need to run some task every 3 hours. But I don't want them to all run at the same time. I need options to either "start this task at some point randomly in the next 3 hours, then every 3 hours thereafter" or "run this task randomly in every 3 hour block", without resorting to manually tweaking hour/minute r…

As a workaround, sounds like you need a deterministic pseudo-random number generator. Find a value that is unique to each server (e.g. the UUID of the / partition?) to seed your PRNG, and then generate the first pseudo-random number. If you do it right, it will always be the same number. Modulo this number against the number of (seconds|minutes|hours) of random delay you want applied, and apply a sleep timer to the s…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

#35

Unfortunately, it's still missing the main cron-killer feature: randomized intervals. I have 200 servers that I need to run some task every 3 hours. But I don't want them to all run at the same time. I need options to either "start this task at some point randomly in the next 3 hours, then every 3 hours thereafter" or "run this task randomly in every 3 hour block", without resorting to manually tweaking hour/minute r…

You may want to checkout fcron

http://fcron.free.fr

It has the every N since last run option.

Re: Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

#36
post #3

You realized that there are already free alternatives like https://cron-job.org/en/ on the market?! I - personally - would never pay for a cron job service ...

There are many reasons why people will pick up a paid product over free.

That's why Linux doesn't have more users than Windows.

Do you realize that price isn't the only thing!?

Re: Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

#38
post #35

Unfortunately, it's still missing the main cron-killer feature: randomized intervals. I have 200 servers that I need to run some task every 3 hours. But I don't want them to all run at the same time. I need options to either "start this task at some point randomly in the next 3 hours, then every 3 hours thereafter" or "run this task randomly in every 3 hour block", without resorting to manually tweaking hour/minute r…

You may want to checkout fcron http://fcron.free.fr It has the every N since last run option.

And jitter and random features too

Re: Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

#39
Congrats, this looks awesome!

How do you deal with getting money (I can see stripe), tax implications and potential liability? Did you consult tax or any other attorneys? Who drafted your terms of service?

Did you establish an LLC? Did you consult an attorney?

Re: Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler

#40

The landing page looks good. The UI screenshots are a little small and hard to read on my screen, but overall, the design is great. You might also want to consider explicitly stating the value proposition: how will I save money/time/etc by using your service? One possible use case that you might be missing are recurrent tasks that I want to ensure are run. For example, for my service, https://pagecheck.app , I run te…

Pretty much every CI/CD system supports scheduled builds. GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Travis, Circle CI, and even Jenkins do.
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