Cron Might Be the Most Boring Technology in the World

Every night at 9PM, a cron job posts a picture in my chat with Adam: a construction-paper version of me going for a walk. Every night the question is the same – where will paper Zach go tonight?

Sometimes one of us hearts it. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes it starts a conversation. Sometimes it just goes by. A little surprise, a reminder, a quick moment to connect.

It’s been doing this for months.

And somewhere along the way Adam started joining my walks. “Alt help my shadow find Zach’s shadow.” “Alt add me to the night walk.”

After the tenth time, it occurred to me: why are we doing this manually? The walk happens at 9PM. So I added another schedule at 9:05 – “take the output from the 9PM schedule and add Adam to it.”

And that’s it… cron piped to another cron (the unix philosophy at work!).

Now paper Zach heads out at 9. Five minutes later, paper Adam joins him.

I love how dumb the machinery behind this is. A schedule, an image, another schedule.

“Where will Zach go?” became “where will we go?”

It’s the kind of question we chase at Alt: where else is a boring tool hiding a way for friends to show up for each other?