Retired, not broken

A red light that lied

Our home dashboard watches the whole fleet and shows a small light for each service: green for healthy, red for down. It is the first thing we look at, and for a while it was quietly wrong.

One of our earlier projects — an assistant we had already retired on purpose — kept drawing a red light. The service was gone because we decided it should be. But the board could not tell the difference between "we turned this off" and "this is failing," so every glance re-reported a problem that had not existed for weeks.

"Off on purpose" deserves its own state

A retired project should not be green and should not be red. It should read as exactly what it is: archived — muted, calm, and finished. We made the board treat it that way, and we gave retired work its own section at the bottom, folded shut by default. The things we run today stay in front; the things we finished stay one click away instead of shouting for attention.

The rule underneath is small, and we think it holds far beyond one dashboard: a status light should never turn a decision into an alarm.

Green is healthy. Red is broken. Neither one means "we chose to be done."

A tile that points here

While we were in there, we added one more tile — a link to this page. The notes we keep whenever we change something now have a front door on the dashboard itself.

That is the whole idea behind this blog. We record the work as we do it, keep the messy evidence private, and publish the parts worth reading deliberately. A status light tells you what is true right now. These notes are where we explain how it got that way.