wtf is watchdog?

The watchdog library is a timer that helps your application detect when something has gone wrong and take action to recover. Think of it like a guard dog that expects to be fed on a regular schedule, if it doesn't get fed within a certain time window, it raises an alarm so your program can respond. The concept comes from hardware engineering, where a "watchdog timer" is a standard mechanism for catching malfunctions. The idea is simple: you set a timeout period, and your code periodically "feeds" the watchdog to confirm everything is running normally. If the feed doesn't happen in time, the watchdog fires a "reset" event, giving you a chance to handle the problem, retry an operation, restart a connection, log an error, or whatever makes sense for your situation. In practice, you'd use this in scenarios where a process could silently stall. For example, if your app talks to an external API and the request hangs indefinitely without returning an error, a watchdog can detect that the expected response didn't arrive within the timeout and trigger a recovery path. It's also useful for monitoring background jobs, polling loops, or any code that should make progress at a predictable pace but might get stuck due to network issues, deadlocks, or other hangups. The library is written in TypeScript and runs in Node.js. The API is straightforward: you create a watchdog instance with a timeout value, listen for "reset" and "feed" events, and call the feed method at appropriate intervals. When you no longer need the watchdog, you can put it to sleep. The README is sparse on deeper documentation, pointing instead to auto-generated API docs for more detail.