Every piece here carries a number. Nobody voted on it.
Digna legi is Latin for “worth reading” — the judgment this site exists to make, and the only one it makes. The number is that judgment, written down.
A program watches 70 hand-picked sources — engineering blogs, newsletters, essayists, a few journals. Everything it finds is read against a written profile of what one reader finds valuable, and scored against it. The profile is a plain document, not a formula: it names the subjects that reader cares about, and just as importantly the ones they don’t — product announcements, release notes, listicles without a mechanism, motivational writing.
The single test that decides most scores is whether a piece leaves you with a mechanism: how something works, and when it goes wrong. A piece that tells you what to do without telling you why it works scores low here, however popular it is.
This is one reader’s judgment, applied consistently. It is not a measure of quality in the abstract, and it is not neutral. A piece scoring 71 here might be the best thing you read this year; it simply sits further from this particular centre of gravity.
The line under each title says what the piece does, not why it scored what it did.
Most are found by scanning sources. Some come from the editor’s own reading archive, built up over years, and a number were gathered from other people’s published reading lists. Those carry a line of credit under the title.