I thought my NOAA ingestion pipeline survived a 4-hour mountain internet outage. It didn't.
While building the dataset for PowDay.AI, I've been pulling down a decade of high-resolution atmospheric data. Last night, my home "datacenter" lost connection for hours.
I woke up, checked the terminal, and saw it still "running." The reality? It had failed silently. Because I hadn't specifically defended against a prolonged network drop with strict client-side timeouts, the script just hung there doing nothing all day, giving me misleading output.
Disappointing? A little. But a great reminder that if a system is going to fail, it needs to fail fast and loudly. I patched in the network timeouts so it will error out correctly next time, and killed the process.
The real win happened when I hit restart.
The state management and failure logging worked flawlessly. The script instantly skipped the months already on disk, went back to backfill the missing chunks from when the network died, and picked up the next item in the queue without missing a beat.
Sometimes the goal isn't preventing the crash; it's making the recovery completely boring.
Just 4 more years of data to go. ❄️
I'm Jon Eby. I'm building PowDay.AI as a solo project on consumer hardware (i.e. RTX 4070 Ti), and writing about what I'm learning as I go. If this kind of work interests you, connect on LinkedIn.