Cordonnier Software: Software built to solve a problem.
See the projects Visit the GitHub orgProjects
Every project here started as a problem in front of the builder — at home, on the road, at work, or in the archive. Most are open source; all of them are in daily use.
Self-hosted, evidence-first genealogy. People, families, events, places, photographs, documents, and citations — every conclusion in the tree traceable back to the record it came from.
A home inventory system: know what you own, where it is, and what it's worth. With an Android companion app and a Home Assistant integration.
An all-in-one application to track gig work: earnings, mileage, and expenses, kept dash by dash instead of reconstructed at tax time.
An app specializing in RV parts and sales: Hollander-style interchange lookup, so you can cross-reference what fits what before you buy.
A simple Android RV leveling system for getting a parked rig flat and settled.
Heating-oil tank level monitoring, so the gauge in the basement isn't the only warning you get.
Snow-plow work, organized: the winter counterpart to the rest of the toolkit.
A Scouting management tool: rosters, advancement, and the paperwork that comes with both.
A virtual governance game: build a government from scratch — de novo — and run it.
A cruise duck hunt game. Yes, the rubber ducks people hide on cruise ships. Hunt them.
In its own organization: a civic-data platform that normalizes election data into a unified API.
The name
Cordonnier (kor-don-YAY) is French for shoemaker — the trade of four generations of the LeFort family, from Joseph Célestin Lefort, cordonnier in Montréal, through Gustave in Worcester's shoe shops, August, and Raymond Jr. at Ray's Shoe Repair.
A shoemaker's work is measured, fitted, and made to last — and repaired rather than replaced. That's the standard this software is built to.
How I build
Your data lives on your hardware, under your control — not rented back to you from someone else's cloud.
Conclusions trace back to sources. If a record can't be shown, it isn't claimed.
No software for its own sake. Each project earns its place by being used, daily, by the person who built it.