I’m Kitty Giraudel, a transfeminine web engineer based in Berlin, focused on accessibility and inclusivity.

Kitty Giraudel is a frontend developer and CSS enthusiast known for her expertise in web design and front-end development. Readers can learn about CSS techniques, web typography, and responsive design. With articles, tutorials, and demos, Kitty Giraudel shares  insights and techniques for creating beautiful and accessible web experiences.

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A detailed account of building a watchdog service for an RPG game server that evolved through multiple incidents. Started with simple process monitoring, then progressed to HTTP health checks, websocket-based validation, population thresholds, and timeout detection. The watchdog now detects deadlocks and runtime starvation within 30 seconds and automatically restarts the server, addressing incidents that previously required manual intervention at 3am. Includes systemd service configuration, bash scripting, Rust implementation details, and lessons learned about multi-threaded race conditions and deadlocks in tokio.

My journey writing a watchdog script

Incident #1: running doesn’t mean healthy

Incident #3: health checks are not live traffic