FreshBSD’s cronjobs and alerting systems are now monitored with Watchgoose, who were kind enough to offer a free paid account – no strings attached – as part of their Open Source program.
Previously I was sending a notification via Pushover when and if a backup or other cronjob explicitly failed. Switching to Watchgoose means I now also get a notification if a job doesn’t complete on its expected schedule – whether it takes too long, or simply doesn’t run at all.
I also have it integrated into my local monitoring, with an always-firing alert triggering a webhook on a regular schedule, so if my local Victoria Metrics stack goes down, I’ll actually notice.
We got a little shout-out, too, alongside some lesser-known projects:
I suppose I should do something to mark it, so let’s take a little stroll through time with the help of the Internet Archive.
Here’s how FreshBSD looked back in 2006, with its simple drop-down filtering menu and lacking even commit message search:
It worked by parsing emails from source code commit mailing lists into a MySQL database. The frontend ran Ruby on Rails, and notably this is roughly the last time I thought that might be a good idea.
By 2009, a rewrite that replaced MySQL with Apache Solr was running alongside, which enabled more efficient search and a first go at supporting facets:
By the start of 2012, another rewrite had the search indexer working directly off source code repositories, and Solr replaced with Elasticsearch. Not relying on email parsers allowed for the expansion to a lot more projects:
2016 saw the first signs of the site you’re using now - another rewrite which added PostgreSQL to the stack and switched the frontend over to Roda.
I also finally got around to making a logo, albeit a rather bland one:
I did a big refinement pass in 2021 which brought the site up to the current standard. Behold, in case you forgot what that looks like:
I guess we’re kind of overdue another big update. The current trend is to make everything worse, right? I’m sure I’ll think of something…
