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Sunday, 11 October 2026 Reading Room

Tech

Dwarf Fortress uses version control now

I remember hearing a while ago that Dwarf Fortress didn't use version control. That fact has been lodged in my head, because given its inherent complexity I have trouble imagining a codebase that would benefit from version control more . That's art. I went looking and I'm sad to report that the days without version control appear to have ended. Quoting Tarn Adams over time: March 2013: "I don't…

simonwillison.net ·

We haven't written up this one. Simon Willison has the full story — the link below goes straight to it.

Read the original at simonwillison.net →

More in Tech

Consistency is not a localized property

  • Consistency cannot be confined to a single component in Apache Kafka.
  • Exactly-once processing requires end-to-end guarantee, application design.
  • Global consistency needs human accountability, not just machine reliability.

·n-the-loop.com

Edtech Observability Stack — Health Monitoring Through Logs, Metrics, and Result Deadlines

An uptime check can prove that an edtech app answers requests while its nightly roster import produces nothing. The useful trade-off is signal quality versus noise: alert on a missed, overdue result…

  • Monitor edtech app health via structured logs, metrics, and completion events
  • Implement uptime probe to verify promised outcomes like student record imports
  • Use TypeScript implementation with OpenTelemetry metrics for aggregate measurements

·dev.to

Your JSON Parses. So Why Did One Value Disappear?

Imagine reviewing a configuration file for a nightly import job. You expect the job to stop after processing 1,000 rows. But the application keeps going until 10,000.

  • Nightly import job expected to stop at 1,000 rows
  • JSON file had duplicate maxrows key with 1000 and 10000
  • Application retained last value, lost initial 1,000

·dev.to

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