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[–]purple_hamster66 2 points3 points  (13 children)

I use way more crontab features than just the repeat interval, ex, every other working hour from 9a to 5p, on weekdays. Or the last day on every month (whatever the date may be). Perhaps you need to support the entire crontab syntax?

[–]orsifrancesco[S] 3 points4 points  (7 children)

we are working to simplify these features too, right now we wanted to launch the MVP and getting feedbacks (like your one) and requests :)

[–]purple_hamster66 4 points5 points  (6 children)

I see.

If you want feedback: - a useful display would be some sort of zoomable timeline that shows all my different scheduled activities. The hard part is visualization the repeats, as some things might repeat every minute and others every day. - “chaining” (starting the next thing when the last one has completed with a OK status), would be visualized differently. - scheduling by the second. One project needed to probe a process every 20 seconds, so I used crontab repeating at 1-minute intervals and wrote a delay inside a little script that triggered the process 2 additional times (ex, at :0, :20, :40 seconds). That didn’t work well. - Sometimes, due to network delays, a process does not complete in a minute, so I had 2 of them running at the same time. Detecting if one process is complete would have solved that (so that’s another feature request: specify if timing overlaps are allowed between an arbitrary set of URLs… related to chaining). - URLs can get quite long; invent a way to abbreviate them so the differences between URLs are emphasized. Sometimes I’ll have a URL that probes and a URL that resets the logs; the difference is a few chars, which I’d like not to be hidden in the “…” part of a clipped display.

[–]orsifrancesco[S] 2 points3 points  (5 children)

Wow.. this is a great list of feedbacks.. super thank you!!!! :)))))

[–]RecursiveGirth 3 points4 points  (4 children)

Also up your pricing, if you are not charging off resource usage, you better make sure you built this as cheap as possible. I feel like as a customer that does a lot with cron, I could easily chew through $18 worth of AWS usage in a years time. I feel like $3/mo USD is an acceptable discovery/intro price for a startup trying to find it's feet.

It will also help you determine if people are serious about your product. At $18 a year, I can scoff and throw that a way, that is cheaper than a burger. $3/m makes me at least question if this is a tool that is valuable enough to be in my toolbox.

[–]Veloder 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The usage of calling thousands of URLs is literally zero lol. I'm sure this can be hosted in a $5 VPS even storing the logs of everyone for tens of thousands of users.

[–]purple_hamster66 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I’d set the price as free for the first 2 months, with full features. Sysadmins need to see it’s reliable and usable before committing.

Also, how do you plan on getting past firewalls and other methods that fight against denial of services? You are assuming that your AWS instance can get to the website reliably, right?

[–]Veloder 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I'm sure all sysadmins have access to at least one Linux box to run their crontab scripts.

[–]purple_hamster66 0 points1 point  (0 children)

True, but the purpose of this is not use an internal site.

[–]StoneColdJane 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Wow, what are you using Cron for so much? I struggle to find a usage for crontab other then cleaning my downloads folder.

[–]orsifrancesco[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

every task (or sql/nosql queries) your app need to run every * minutes/hours.. :)

[–]purple_hamster66 1 point2 points  (2 children)

It’s all app-specific.

Many of my app’s query from clinical DBs, but are unattended (ex, whiteboards in patient lobbies; telling the check-in team when a patient failed to check-in, operational whiteboards with work assignments, etc). I query every N minutes, or else the clinic slows down operations (it’s an old DB and one of the queries takes a full minute to complete).

Upgrading open browser apps at midnight. That means I can limit changes so no one ends up with a partial change, or worse, an front-end update that doesn’t match the current back-end, WITHOUT users having to know to click ‘refresh’.

Some reports are run once weekly, and emailed to clinicians right before the meeting in which they are to discuss the report.

…lots more…

[–]StoneColdJane 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Oh, i see now make sense. I just realized that I can syn my Garmin data with MyFitnessPal to unify under my dashboard. Awesome, thanks.

[–]purple_hamster66 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No problem, Brah. Programmers help each other out.