AI made starting free.
Someone still has to finish.

Vellum is a 4k-line Go program that turns MDX into static HTML. No JS, no hydration, no client framework. I built it because every other SSG I tried had a config file longer than my actual content. Vellum has zero config. The trade-off: you can't extend it. That's by design. Maintenance was light — I'd update a dependency every 3 months. I stopped when the Go ecosystem moved to generics and I didn't want to do the migration.

Hearth is what I wanted Things 3 to be: local-first, keyboard-driven, no account, no cloud. I built it for myself in Svelte 4. Worked great for 8 months. Then I started using Apple Reminders because it was already on my phone. The code is clean, the data model is solid, the keyboard shortcuts are good. Someone who wants a Things alternative would love it.

Pollen is the CMS I wanted to use for my own freelance work. WYSIWYG-friendly for clients, but stores structured data. Built the editor as a contenteditable wrapper that emits JSON Schema. Adopted by Pollen Labs (I'm still on the board but no longer the maintainer).

Tidepool is what I wanted CRDT libraries to be: a single binary you can drop into any project, sync SQLite between devices, no server required. The hardest part was the merge logic for partial indexes, which I got working in v0.3 but the API was confusing. I rewrote it twice. v0.4 was the cleanest version and that's what's in main. The README has a "I'm walking away" note pointing here.