nothing has gone down in a year. here is why that is not luck

dev · Nov 16, 2025 · 1 min read

one of the projects i maintain has been up continuously for over a year. people keep asking if i got lucky.

partly i did. but mostly it is three boring decisions i made early and never revisited.

1. boring hosting

static files where possible, a small runtime where necessary, a database that is a file. every clever thing i added to the stack got removed within a month because it added a way to fail.

2. the boring part is observable

the only thing i built for myself that i would call infrastructure is a health check i actually look at. not a dashboard i forgot about. a check, a log line, and me reading it.

3. no clever deployments

one branch, one build command, one place it runs. no canary, no blue-green, no matrix of environments. the entire deployment is short enough to read in one breath, which means when it breaks i understand why.

the honest part

the site went down anyway, twice, for reasons that had nothing to do with sophistication. a certificate, and my own bad configuration during a migration.

nothing clever would have saved either. reading the log would have.