On the same machine, two Node.js scripts run in the background. The first publishes to dev.to at 9am and LinkedIn at 10am — a cron, three lines of config. The second watches a job queue every 30 seconds, keeps state in memory, and reacts to user interface actions within seconds — a daemon supervised by systemd.
Same language, same server, apparently the same goal: run tasks in the background. Yet the choice is different. It's not a matter of taste or habit — it's that the two problems only look similar from a distance.
The simple case: a cron for publishing
The publishing cron is deliberately boring. A user crontab entry:
0 9 * * * bash /home/folken/work/cv/scripts/devto-cron.sh >> logs/devto-cron.log 2>&1
