Projects
What I’m working on now. Most of these started because something kept changing and nobody had a good way to keep track of it.
Keep a Changelog
Keep a Changelog started in 2014 as a rant about projects dumping their git logs into a file and calling it a changelog. It’s a short set of guidelines for writing changelogs for humans, not machines: latest version first, a section for each release, and changes grouped by what they mean to the people upgrading.
Volunteers have translated it into 28 languages, and I keep running into it in projects I’ve never heard of. I’m still surprised how far this little project has gone.
Shields
One night in January 2013 I got annoyed at the badges on open source READMEs. Every service drew its own, each copy looked a little worse than the last, and nobody seemed to mind. So I opened Photoshop and designed one template with consistent padding, a more legible typeface, better contrast, and softer colors. I called it Shields, after The Shield, and because a police officer’s badge is sometimes called a shield.
Travis CI, Code Climate, and a bunch of other services got involved, and the template turned into shields.io, which makes a badge on the fly from a label, a value, and a color. It’s run by its community now and turned 10 in 2023. I still love spotting those badges on projects all over GitHub.
Indigene
An indigene is a native of a place. Indigene measures the sun where you’re standing, looks up the soil and climate for those exact coordinates, and tells you which plants belong there, in plain words.
Most gardens are green but nearly lifeless. Baby songbirds eat almost nothing but caterpillars, and caterpillars can only eat the plants they evolved with, so a garden full of imported plants doesn’t feed much of anything. The fix is cheap, though. Plant one native and the food web starts coming back that same season.
What I couldn’t find was a straight answer to “what should I plant in this corner?” that didn’t assume I already knew the jargon. So Indigene explains every term it uses. It tells you how sure it is (the sun reading is a range, and you can overrule the soil map) and where every number comes from. There’s no account. The only thing it counts is how often each page gets opened, with no cookie, and you can switch even that off. It works offline at the far end of your garden. It’s MIT-licensed so any land trust or town council can run their own copy without asking.
Maison
A house is probably the most expensive thing you’ll ever buy, and nobody gives you a manual for it. Warranties, appliance manuals, contractor bids, the last time someone serviced the HVAC. All of it ends up scattered across drawers, inboxes, and spreadsheets, until you can’t answer simple questions about your own home.
Maison is home management for conscientious folks. It keeps one record of your home’s devices, energy use, and maintenance history. Think of it as a changelog for a house, kept for you now and for whoever lives there next. It doesn’t show ads, and it doesn’t sell or share your data.