That feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realise you've been _building_ it hurts. I still feel complicit. I worked for a hardware startup in 2013/2014

That feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realise you've been _building_ it hurts. I still feel complicit. I worked for a hardware startup in 2013/2014. Part of my role was to populate and run the private pacman server that the devices got their OS and software updates from (we ran ARCH, but didn't connect to the public ARCH pacman repos, because we had some hardware specific code and kernel mods we needed to work, so we tested everything that updated on there public pacman repos before letting the devices load them). The startup failed after the first batch of products were shipped - as they are wont to do. Much acrimony about who owned what. I kept the Linode instance running the pacman server on my own credit card for years, but eventually the domain name (or perhaps the dns hosting, I don't recall) expired and the only devices that still knew how to get to the repo were my own. If I'd have a heads-up that dns was going to die, I could have pushed a config change to use a domain name under my control, but it just unexpectedly switched off. There were only a few hundred devices I was keeping software updates flowing to. But the feeling of despair when I was no longer able to do that and finally decommissioned that Linode server was heartbreaking.