Failure

I've been a day behind without making a failure post for a couple of weeks, as part of an experiment to see if not making a failure post and just catching up later would work. Evidence suggests it doesn't, and as of today I'm two days behind. Oops.

I was initially against the idea, but I thought it might be nice to have the flexibility to soft-fail and recover. One aspect I'm particularly iffy about is that I didn't flag that expectation in advance in any way. Changing my expectations in advance is one thing, but doing it on the fly is a recipe for trouble.

So my new plan to hopefully avoid this kind of meta-failure is to be more specific about what my metric is for failure and stick to that. I'm still posting in arrears until I can figure out the best way to deal with CouchDB's foibles. That means a post by 11:59:59 UTC on the stated day. I'm still going to give myself the soft-fail loophole to see how I like it, so I might lie and post twice the next day in exceptional circumstances. However, if don't fix it by the next day's post then that's a fail and I'll make a failure post.

Once I get the posting in advance thing working properly, I'll try getting rid of all that and have a strict posting schedule to see if that works better. I suspect it will, but if I need more flexibility then I'll have to figure something else out.