I spent months unemployed and built a thing. Here's why.

Maksim — Sun, 03 May 2026 12:59:21 +0000

For the past few months I've been unemployed.

Not the worst thing that happened to me, but enough time to slow down and think. At some point I started talking to AI about what to build — just exploring ideas. One of them stuck.

Here's the problem it solves:

You have a cron job. It runs every hour, does a database backup, syncs some data — whatever. It works quietly in the background. Your server is up, UptimeRobot is happy.

But the job itself silently stopped running two weeks ago.

You'll find out when you need that backup.

This is what's called a Dead Man's Switch — if something stops sending a heartbeat, assume it's broken. It's a simple concept that most monitoring tools don't cover because they ping servers, not tasks.

So I built CronPulse.

It's a Telegram bot. You create a checker, get a URL, append it to your cron job. If the ping doesn't arrive on schedule — you get an alert. That's it.

I'm not writing this to show off a finished product.

I'm writing this to find the first people who actually need it — and to understand whether this solves a real problem or just an imaginary one.

If you've ever been burned by a silent cron failure, or you're the kind of person who thinks "yeah I should probably monitor that" — I'd genuinely like to hear from you.

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I spent months unemployed and built a thing. Here's why.