Ring the Bell on a Quiet Day

This essay was first published on the Zyaku blog.

Picture a dry afternoon a few weeks before the rains. Someone in a small town pulls the torch out of the drawer and clicks it. Nothing. The batteries died sometime in the winter and nobody noticed, because nobody needed a torch in the winter. So they buy new ones, put the torch back, and forget about it.

That small, boring moment is the most useful thing anyone in that house will do all season. Not because the torch matters on a dry afternoon. Because the night it matters, there will be no time to find out it doesn't work.

This week we shipped something built on that idea. If you have disaster alerts switched on for a device in Zyaku's Crisis section, you can now send yourself a test alert, close Zyaku, and watch it arrive on your phone or your computer. Or watch it not arrive, which is the more important half.

The best day to check a torch is a day you don’t need one.

The alert I couldn't see

A warning nobody receives is only a log entry.

I'll start with the uncomfortable part, because it's why this exists.

A little while ago I noticed that alerts weren't showing up on my own devices when Zyaku was closed. So I went looking. On our side, everything looked fine. Every alert went out. The services that carry notifications to phones and browsers kept saying yes, we've got it.

But "we've got it" from a delivery service is not "it reached your phone". It means the message was accepted into a queue. Whether it was ever handed over to the device was a separate answer that came back later, and we weren't reading that answer at all. A phone that had uninstalled the app, or a missing setting somewhere in the chain, looked exactly the same to us as an alert that had landed. Our records said sent. The phone said nothing, because it never heard anything.

That's a quiet kind of failure, and quiet failures are the dangerous ones. Nothing breaks. No error appears. Everyone involved believes the warning system works, right up until the night it's needed.

So we fixed it from both ends. On our side, we now go back and read the answer that says whether a phone really took the alert, and we treat a refusal as a refusal instead of a success. And on your side, we gave you a button.

What a test is for

A bell nobody has rung is a guess about a bell.

The test alert is simple on purpose. Switch on alerts for the device you're holding, press Send a test alert, close Zyaku, and wait. If it shows up, you know that this device, with these settings, can be reached when the app isn't open. If it doesn't, you've learned that on a calm day, with time to fix it.

I think about this as the difference between a promise and a check. Every app with notifications makes the same promise: we'll tell you. Very few let you check that promise yourself, on your own phone, without waiting for something bad to happen. And the person holding the phone is the only one who can really check it. We can see what left our servers. We can't see your battery saver, your browser settings, or the switch you turned off last year and forgot about.

We kept the test deliberately small. It goes only to your own devices. You can't send it to anyone else, and you can't fire it over and over, because a warning that cries wolf trains people to ignore it. And when it arrives, it says plainly that it's a test, so nobody's heart jumps.

A backup nobody has restored

A copy you’ve never opened is a hope, not a backup.

Before Zyaku, I worked in finance for years. One habit from that world has followed me into software more than any other. You don't trust anything that has only been tested on paper.

In finance, a transaction either happened or it didn't. I've written that before. The quieter lesson underneath it is that you only know which one by checking. A backup you've never restored from is not a backup. It's a hope with a filename. A procedure nobody has walked through is a document, not a procedure. The people I learned the most from were the ones who insisted on running the drill even when everyone in the room was sure it would pass, because that certainty was exactly what they didn't trust.

Disaster alerts are the same kind of thing. The whole point of them is that they work on a day nobody can predict. That means the only fair time to test them is a day when nothing is happening. If the first real test of a warning system is the warning itself, it isn't really a system yet.

Small rehearsals everywhere

If something is slow, say so, and show the way out.

Once I started looking for this pattern, I saw it in a few other changes we made this week and last.

On the web, Zyaku used to show a plain black page while it was opening. On a slow connection that black page could sit there long enough to make you wonder if anything was happening at all. Now Zyaku shows its logo while it opens. And if opening takes unusually long, it says so, and offers two ways forward: reload, or go straight to emergency help, which works without an account. Someone on one bar of signal in a bad hour shouldn't have to wait for the whole app to load before they can reach the part that might help them.

The editors got a smaller version of the same honesty. While you write an article or a post, one quiet line underneath now says where your words are: saved on this device, saved to Zyaku, waiting for signal, being sent, or published. Reports filed without signal show it too, and say when they need you. It's not a test button, but it does the same job. It lets you check the state of something you care about while you still have time to act on it.

None of these are big features. They're the software version of clicking the torch.

What a test can't do

A test proves one moment. It doesn’t promise the next.

I want to be careful here, because a test button can create its own kind of false confidence.

A test that arrives today proves that one device could be reached at one moment. It doesn't promise that the next storm will find your phone charged, your settings unchanged, or a network still standing. It's worth running again when you change phones, change browsers or change settings.

There are limits I can't engineer away. On a computer, a browser that has been fully quit can't receive a notification at all. That's how browsers work, not something we chose. The test doesn't fix that. It makes it visible, which I think is the honest thing to do with a limit you can't remove.

Some of our own work isn't finished either. The phone apps aren't public yet, so everything here is about Zyaku in your browser. For emergency messages you write without signal, the rule is still the same: the first one sends by itself when signal returns, even with Zyaku closed, only in Chrome on Android or in Chrome or Edge on a computer. Any message written after that waits for you to press Send or Send all, and they go in the order you wrote them. Mesh, where phones pass messages to each other without a network, is still in testing.

And the most important line, which I'll keep repeating as long as I write these: Zyaku is not an emergency service. If you're in danger, call your local emergency number first. An alert from us is meant to be one more way to hear something, never the only one.

Ring it on a quiet day

Quiet days are for checking. Loud ones are for acting.

When I look back at the last few weeks of building, the work I'm proudest of isn't the work that looks impressive in a demo. It's the work that lets ordinary people check things for themselves. Where is my draft. Did my message go. Will this warning actually reach me.

Software usually asks for trust. I'd rather it earned it in front of you, on an ordinary afternoon, with nothing at stake.

So if you use Zyaku, try it once. Switch on alerts for your device in Crisis, send yourself the test, close the app and wait. If it arrives, good. If it doesn't, you've found out on the right day, and I'd like to hear what got in the way.

And a question for everyone, whether you use Zyaku or not. What's the one thing in your life you're sure works but have never actually tested? A smoke alarm, a spare key, a backup, an emergency contact who changed their number? I'm curious which one you went and checked after reading this.

Rohit Kashyap

Founder & CEO, Zyaku · Founder, TAMVEL

Safety on Zyaku · About the founder