Projects
Constant Variable is an oxymoron on purpose. In code, a constant never changes and a variable never sits still — and in practice, the only constant is change. Every project here starts from that tension: take something that won't stop moving — software, project metadata, a patch of ground — and give people a steady, human-readable way to make sense of it.
Maison
A house is among the most expensive things a person will ever own and the least documented. Warranties, appliance manuals, contractor bids, the date the HVAC was last serviced — it scatters across drawers, inboxes, and spreadsheets until nobody can answer simple questions about the place they live in.
Maison is home management for conscientious folks: one clear record of a home’s devices, energy use, and maintenance history. It is, in effect, a changelog for a house — built in that spirit deliberately, playing the long game so the record serves you now and whoever owns the place next. Your data stays yours: no ads, no selling, no sharing.
Keep a Changelog
Software never stops changing — the question is whether anyone can tell what changed, and why it matters. Keep a Changelog is a convention for writing changelogs for humans, not machines: one legible, chronological record per project, with every notable change grouped by what it means to the people affected by it.
What began as one exasperated document became a standard adopted across the industry, translated by volunteers into dozens of languages. The format is the constant; the software it describes is the variable.
Shields
README badges — build status, versions, downloads — were once a visual free-for-all: every service drew its own, at its own size, in its own style. Shields started in 2013 as a design specification arguing they should be concise, consistent, and legible: one constant visual language for endlessly variable metadata.
The spec grew into shields.io, the community-run service that now renders badges for a staggering share of the world’s open source projects. The data changes by the minute; the design holds still so you can actually read it.
Indigene
An indigene is a native of a place. The app measures the sun where you’re standing, looks up the soil and climate for those exact coordinates, and hands back the plants that belong there — in plain words the whole way. It reads the variables of a spot to find its constants: the species that were there all along.
Most gardens are green and nearly lifeless. Baby songbirds are raised almost entirely on caterpillars, and caterpillars can only eat the plants they evolved alongside, so a garden of imports feeds almost nothing — a quiet subtraction happening across whole countries, one tidy garden at a time. The remedy is unusually cheap and fast: plant one native and the food web restarts the same season.
What was missing was never the will. It was a straight answer to “what should I plant in this actual corner?” that doesn’t assume you already speak catalogue. So Indigene explains every term it uses, shows its error bars — the sun reading is a range, the soil map is a claim you’re invited to overrule — and traces every number to a source. No account, no analytics, works offline at the far end of a garden. MIT-licensed on purpose: a civic tool built on public science that any land trust or council can take and run without asking.