How I Built a Dead-Man's Switch for My AI Trading Pipeline in Python

Short summary

The author discovered their trading bot had silently stopped running for three days with no error or alert. They explain why traditional try/except error handling fails for unattended jobs that never start, and propose a dead-man's switch pattern: the job pings an external server on success, and the server alerts if expected pings don't arrive within a grace window.

• •Traditional error handling can't detect jobs that never start — silence is the most dangerous failure
• •Dead-man's switch pattern: job pings external watcher on success; watcher alerts if ping is missing
• •Includes minimal Python implementation using only standard library urllib

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