Colophon

The shape of it

A GitHub Actions cron job runs daily, fetches each API, validates the response against a schema, writes JSON into the repo and commits. Vercel sees the commit and rebuilds. The site is fully static: no runtime API calls, no client-side keys, no cold starts. The browser only ever reads JSON that’s already in the repo.

Because every run commits, the git history is the database — and it’s public, so you can check whether a number moved when I said it did. Each run also writes a dated snapshot to data/snapshots/, pruned after 18 months.

Sources

What happens when a source breaks

• A failed fetch leaves the last good JSON untouched and marks that source as failed. The lane says it couldn’t reach the API rather than rendering an empty state that implies nothing happened.
• A response that returns 200 but doesn’t match its schema is treated as a failure. Garbage that validates is worse than an outage.
• One dead API degrades one lane. The workflow still succeeds and the other lanes still update.
• Every number carries the date it was fetched. A stale number is shown as stale, not quietly re-dated.

Hand-written parts

Two things can’t come from an API: the Wandr release log and kernel/reading list, and the four lines on /now. The first is constrained instead — every entry must carry a link to something that proves it, and a CI check fails the build if one doesn’t. The /now stamp comes from the file’s git commit date, so it can’t claim to be fresher than it is.

Read it

• the cron workflow
• the schemas everything is validated against
• the fetchers, one per source
• the committed JSON this page is built from
• every data commit, ever