The Plus Sign Does the Counting
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
30+ is the number of repositories this site admits to. It sits in a hand-written JSON file the build reads, under a comment that says what the file is: a curated public feed, redacted, deny by default, not a proxy to anything live, numbers human-approved and rounded. A test enforces the deny-by-default half. Every key in the file, top level and per stat, must be on an allow list, so that a dollar figure or a hostname cannot be added by accident. The test reads keys. It has no opinion about values.
The value has been edited twice. In June the line said “projects in flight: 20+”. On the day in July the site went fully live, with its own domain and a pipeline that tests and deploys on every push, the number became 30+, and by then thirty-seven of the repositories now in the workspace already had a first commit. Two weeks later the label changed and the number did not. A session fixing hover states on the projects page noticed that “projects in flight” contradicted the page it was fixing, which showed exactly three cards marked building; thirty-odd things in flight and three being built cannot both be true on one site. “Repositories in the workspace” is a count, not a claim about motion, and the count was still right.
It is still right, which is what rounding is for. The workspace has passed sixty git directories, worktrees and review copies included, and the feed says the same two characters it said in July. An exact count would need an edit most weeks, and every edit is a public record of a private week. The changelog beside the feed carries month-granular dates on purpose, with a comment explaining that a day-level public log correlates with the private ones. A rounded count ages well for the same reason it leaks nothing.
The rule for live values everywhere else here is to point at the source rather than copy it: a document names the file that owns a number, or the command that prints it. This number cannot point. Its source is a directory listing on a machine the site may not name. So it is the one copied value on the site, and the plus sign is what lets a copy stay true.