From a blog post to a daily email

My friend David Hussman gave his age as a version number. In February 2018 I wrote it up as Your Version Number and mapped it onto semantic versioning: decades are the major version, years into the decade the minor, and days since your last birthday the patch. I was v4.6.52 that day. David died that August. The arithmetic is his, and the site’s About page says so.

For years the idea lived in a Workflow script, and then a shortcut on my phone. In May 2026 I finally made it a website with Claude Code, shared in Weekly Thing 346 and then in a launch post. Everything lives in the URL, so a view can be bookmarked or sent to someone, with no account. A Work Edition does the same arithmetic for a job.

After making the site I wished I got my version by email, and then wondered what it would be like to add notes to each version. So I built it. Release Notes started on October 8, 2026. Each morning an email says “You’re 5.4.278 today,” and whatever you reply becomes that version’s release notes. It is lightweight journaling built around the reply, with a writing streak, “On this day” notes from earlier releases, tags and search, photos and audio, and an API that lets agents in with the owner’s say-so.

Three weeks later, on October 29, 2026, I built Changelog in a day: an iPhone app for getting notes into Release Notes in two taps, with photos, voice memos, places, Siri and widgets. It numbers itself the way Release Notes numbers people, which I find delightful.

One idea from a friend, eight years of carrying it around, and then three things in six months.