The arsenal
Every one of these started as something we needed and could not buy. They are deliberately narrow — a tool that tries to do everything ends up being the thing you have to work around.
Shipping
Beta means the surface still moves. It does not mean it will lose your data.
Know before you upgrade.
Simulate a dependency upgrade before you commit to it. Drop in a manifest and see the breaking changes, CVEs, licence problems and compatibility issues across Node, PHP, Python, Go and Java — free, with no sign-up to start.
Review below, above and beyond the diff.
Code review the way a principal engineer does it — below the diff for bugs and security, above it for architecture and intent, beyond it for what the code actually does in production. For legacy systems it discovers the architecture before it reviews anything.
In the lab
Published early because the problem is real and we would rather argue about the shape of the solution now than after we build it.
The invoice your architecture never sends.
Every tool you adopt bills you in engineer-hours, onboarding time and cognitive load — not just dollars. StackTax puts a number on the bill so "let's add a service" stops being a free sentence.
Read the code nobody documented.
Drop it on a codebase whose authors have all left. Get the module map, the hidden coupling, the parts that are load-bearing and the parts that are just scary — before you promise anyone a delivery date.
Your impact, with receipts.
Performance review season should not be an archaeology exercise. ShipLog keeps a running, evidence-linked record of what you actually shipped and why it mattered — written continuously, not reconstructed in a panic.