Spent the day tearing out the old batch job and replacing it with something that doesn't fall over every Tuesday. It fell over on Wednesday instead. Progress, of a kind.
Notes to self: the retry logic was never the problem. The problem was pretending the queue could never be empty.
There's a version of a project that's 80% done and shippable, and a version that's 100% done and never leaves the drawer. Starting to think the second one is a trap dressed up as diligence.
Three servers, one spreadsheet of dependencies, zero downtime windows anyone actually respected. Wrote the runbook at 2am, which means it's either brilliant or completely wrong. Will find out Monday.
The best piece of software I used this week was a text file. No sync, no login, no notification badge. It just held what I put in it. More things should behave like that.