I love that all of my best innovations are mainframe-era derived. I fucking love old computer hardware. My favorite file formats are the Dataspool and Datacart.
An append-only reel of outputs I can replay in a consistent binary format, and the Datacard is akin to a punch card.
I have a few cards, backed by my Content Markup Language.
- Security Card: replaces .env files.
- Configuration Card: replaces arbitrary configs with signed and versioned encrypted copies.
- Instruction Card: often used to convert my Runes into a bytecode format that is, again, signed and encrypted.
You can also combine those cards into a Dataspool to read them all into memory in one go and seek what you need from it. The Dataspool works by chopping the file metadata off the files, storing in a hidden database within the file, and appending the file contents into an append-only table in order, which then gets indexed and recorded into the database, which is re-encoded as a jump-point via tiny 2-byte markers.