use-cases / a-progress-bar-your-boss-can-spectate / hero

PIPE · ?PROGRESS · SSE

A progress bar your boss can spectate without joining

You're running an eight-hour migration. Five people want a status without consuming a receiver slot or interrupting the stream. Append ?progress to the pipe URL. Anyone who opens it gets a live HTML dashboard — bytes transferred, current speed, ETA, state transitions. The migration runs at full speed regardless of how many eyes are watching.

Read the pipe progress docs

pipe.hoody.com

GETpipe.hoody.com/api/v1/pipe/migration?progress

MIGRATION · acme-prod-202612 SPECTATORS

idlewaitingstreamingcomplete

TRANSFERRED62%

BYTES4.7 GBof 7.6 GB

MB/S11830s avg

ETA14 mleft

event-streamtext/event-stream

event: statestreaming · receivers=1
event: progress62% · 4.7 GB · 118 MB/s
event: progress62% · 14m left · 12 spectators
event: statestill streaming, no spectator slot used

use-cases / a-progress-bar-your-boss-can-spectate / mechanism

How the boss watches without touching the stream

?progress is a side-channel read. It never claims a receiver slot, never creates backpressure, never touches the bytes. The migration runs at full bandwidth regardless of how many people are watching.

SPECTATOR TIMELINEZERO RECEIVER SLOTS

T+0 min

BOSS OPENS URL

She pastes the pipe URL with ?progress into her phone browser. The HTML dashboard appears instantly — state: waiting, 0% — no install, no login, no receiver slot consumed.

T+22 min

STREAM IS LIVE

SSE pushes a state: streaming event. The progress bar snaps to 22%, bytes tick up, MB/s settles at 118. The dashboard updates itself every 250 ms without a single page reload.

T+4 h

BOSS GOES TO BED

She closes the tab. Her spectator connection drops. The migration doesn't notice — it was never in the data path. The sender and its one real receiver carry on.

T+8 h

WAKES TO 100%

She reopens the URL at sunrise. The dashboard shows a done event: 7.6 GB transferred, 8h 2m, no errors. Server-side state survives the refresh — latecomers always see the final line.

T+8h 4m

SENDS THE ACK

She forwards the URL to the team Slack. Three engineers open it and see the same done state. No status thread to close, no Grafana panel to un-star. One URL, five witnesses, zero interruptions.

spectate.sh

# 1. Sender — eight-hour migration. Same as always.
tar czf - /var/lib/postgres | curl -T - "$PIPE/api/v1/pipe/migration"

# 2. Receiver — the only client that matters for backpressure.
curl "$PIPE/api/v1/pipe/migration" | tar xzf - -C /restore

# 3. Boss opens the URL on her phone. HTML dashboard. No setup.
# => https://pipe.hoody.com/api/v1/pipe/migration?progress

# 4. You want SSE for a Slack bot? Same URL, different Accept.
curl -N -H "Accept: text/event-stream" \
  "$PIPE/api/v1/pipe/migration?progress" \
  | grep -E '^event: (progress|state|done)'
# event: state    \n data: '{'"state":"streaming","receivers":1'}'
# event: progress \n data: '{'"bytes":5046464512,"mbps":118,"etaSec":840'}'
# event: done     \n data: '{'"bytes":8160000000,"durationSec":28800'}'

Three SSE event types. state for transitions (idle → waiting → streaming → complete), progress every 250 ms while bytes flow (bytesTransferred, speed, ETA), done once at the end with final stats. Up to fifty spectators per path, each with a five-minute connect window.

use-cases / a-progress-bar-your-boss-can-spectate / audience

Every stakeholder, one read-only URL

?progress is a side-channel. Boss, coworker, external client, on-call — they all open the same URL. None of them affect the transfer. All of them see the same live state.

BOSS

Bookmarks the URL on her phone. Checks twice a day.

HTML dashboard, no login

READ-ONLY

COWORKER

Curl SSE into a Slack webhook. One-liner status bot.

text/event-stream, same URL

READ-ONLY

EXTERNAL CLIENT

Embedded in a public status page. Polls every 30 s.

0 receiver slots, full live state

READ-ONLY

ON-CALL

Wired to PagerDuty via the done event. Pings when finished.

event: done, one-shot trigger

READ-ONLY

use-cases / a-progress-bar-your-boss-can-spectate / punchline

Watching the migration is its own URL. The migration doesn't notice.

0 RECEIVER SLOTS USEDUP TO 50 SPECTATORS PER PATH

MIGRATION1 sender, 1 receiver, full bandwidth

SPECTATORS12 boss-eyes on the dashboard, 0 backpressure

no Slack channel to babysit
no Grafana dashboard to wire
no progress endpoint to write

use-cases / a-progress-bar-your-boss-can-spectate / replaces

What this replaces

Every team has a way to answer 'how far along is it?' Most of those ways cost a service to run, a dashboard to wire, or a chat channel to babysit. A query parameter on the pipe URL costs none of that.

Slack #migrations channel updatesA human typing percentages every five minutes
Grafana dashboardsAn exporter, a Prometheus scrape, a panel to maintain
Custom progress endpointsBespoke route, bespoke schema, bespoke retention bug
Tmux-share over SSHBastion access just to watch a number tick up
Datadog metric panelsPer-host agent and per-metric pricing for one transfer
'are we there yet' pingsFive teammates asking the same question on different threads

use-cases / a-progress-bar-your-boss-can-spectate / cta

Send the URL. Stop sending updates.

Read the pipe API guide

use-cases / a-progress-bar-your-boss-can-spectate / related

Read the others

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A scheduled digest that fans out to 200 inboxes

Cron at 9am POSTs to an exec script that builds the digest and curls a pipe URL with ?n=200. Two hundred recipients hit the same URL once.

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Cron

An agent that grades yesterday's agents

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Cleanup jobs that schedule their own retirement

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Files·Containers

Fifty demo environments for fifty sales calls

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Containers·Snapshots

A progress bar your boss can spectate without joining

How the boss watches without touching the stream

Every stakeholder, one read-only URL

What this replaces

Read the others

Sixty containers on one server

Onboard a developer with one link

API endpoints that materialize on demand

Branch computers like Git

Real VS Code on your phone

AI agents that spawn other AI agents

One sandbox per customer, automatically

Wake up to a finished prototype

Emergency production fix from your phone

Tail production logs to a URL anyone can curl

Push one build to thirty CI workers at once

Watch your agent think from the coffee shop

Share your screen with a URL, not a meeting invite

Move 200GB between clouds with two curls

Send a teammate a database state in one line

Stream LLM tokens to anything that reads HTTP

The webhook fan-out you didn't have to build

A CI cache that's just two curl commands

Drag-drop uploads into your script

Broadcast a workshop to 200 viewers from your laptop

Inter-container IPC without the message broker

Tail your agent on the train, get pinged when it lands

A microphone over HTTP, in two terminals

Five agents, five pipes, one verdict

Replay this morning's incident to the whole team

The fastest 'send me that file' you've ever typed

Run a local LLM, serve it to your whole fleet

A live metrics dashboard with no metrics backend

The cron job that deletes itself when you're done

Snapshot the container right before the nightly migration

A separate crontab for every customer, automatically

Wake an agent at 3am, retire it at 4

Daily rollups without an orchestrator

A crontab per branch, deployed with the code

On-call escalation that ages out with the shift

Hourly scrape, daily digest, weekly archive — one container

Let your customers BYO their own cron schedule

Schedule the agent, not the script

A heartbeat for the silent jobs

Keep the last 24 hours as 24 snapshots

Replay this morning's webhooks at the same time tomorrow

Edit your crontab from a phone, in the airport

A scheduled digest that fans out to 200 inboxes

Mute the flaky job without losing it

An agent that grades yesterday's agents

Cleanup jobs that schedule their own retirement

Roll your TLS certificates without an SSH session

A weekly canary that tries to break production

The hobby-project graveyard you can afford to keep alive

A preview environment per pull request, all month

Run a 12-product portfolio from one bare-metal box

Kill the staging-server tax

Forty client sites, one rent, one dashboard

Replace the E2B bill with the bare metal you already rent

Idle staging costs nothing, so staging stops getting deleted

Per-customer sandboxes at fleet scale

The CI cache that's not an S3 line item

Fifty demo environments for fifty sales calls