05 Dec 2025 1 min read

My family ask me for a post-mortem

Not literally, but they depend on some of the tools I build, and when they break they want to know why.

Edit 2025-12-07
It would seem that the Reddit post has been removed due to "spam or low effort." The discussions below it were still present and pretty interesting so there is at least that.

When my son was born I created a Discord bot which allows me and my wife to track all sorts of things; poops, feeding schedule, wake up times, medications. It was very handy, until it broke down. At that time my home server was this little box that did far too much for its own good, so sometimes the box would die for various reasons like OOM or one time my kid just flicked the switch on the wall.

It was built with go, ran in docker, it did the job. These Days I’d probably still go that route, but also add some health checks and a more sturdy deployment pipeline. It would also live on a more sturdy box too.

Whenever it died my wife would ask me what happened, and I would need to say the cause as well as a solution to avoid it happening again.

I added more RAM and tweaked it so it wasn’t killed when the pc was low on RAM.

I moved it to behind the T.V, where Ben can't reach.

This was about 4 years ago. We still do use some tools that I host or have built, which do break at times and I still need to let the wifey know what went wrong.

I'm writing this is because I saw this post on reddit, which made me chuckle. It made me realise that they are informal post-mortem's, an RCA to my wife and promise this was just a blip. I also realised that I need to write down what happens if things fall over and I am in London, or out visiting my mum. A couple playbooks at arms reach of the PC.

Are there any tools that you use and people other than you depend on them?