Cron Checker cronchecker.net
Technologies: cron, Ruby, and Sinatra
Why Did I Make This?
I’ve long been frustrated with the highly technical explanations I found online of the cron syntax. (For those unaware, Linux, and Mac OS X, and the like use cron to schedule recurring tasks like reports or maintenance.) I knew roughly what I need to know usually, but I’d often not be entirely clear when specifically my command would run.
Enter CronChecker.net. Type in a cron statement, and it will tell you exactly, in plain English when it will run (or tell you it’s invalid if that’s the case). No fuss, no muss.
What Did I Learn?
I had never released a Sinatra app, so I got good exposure to that technology. Thankfully, Rack and Passenger make deploying Sinatra just as simple as a Rails app.
I was also able to release an application built entirely with test-driven development from the beginning. Aside from the benefits of testing all your code, writing the tests first help better-designed and more maintainable code, incentivizing small, reusable methods.