The Cron Job That Never Fired: NULL next_due_at and Rows Born Outside the API
Oct 28, 2026
5 min read
Last week I inserted a heartbeat wake straight into Postgres with psql, enabled it, waited for the schedule to roll over… and nothing. No fire, no log line, no error. The wake just sat there, enabled = TRUE, looking exactly as healthy as a row that is never going to do anything.
If you’ve read my earlier post about the cron fire that never stopped, you know this scheduler has had a busy month. Different bug, same lesson: the scheduler’s assumptions and the database’s reality had drifted apart, and nobody noticed because the failure mode was silence.
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