About
Where this came from, and the arithmetic, which is the whole trick.
It started as a blog post
In February 2018 Jamie Thingelstad wrote “Your Version Number”, borrowing an idea from his friend David Hussman: track your age the way software tracks releases. He was on 4.6.52 at the time. This site is that post, made clickable.
David died in August 2018, six months later. The habit he started is the whole reason this exists, and the arithmetic below is his.
Birthdays
Three numbers, all of them from one date.
- Major
- your age divided by ten, rounded down
- Minor
- the years left over
- Patch
- days since your last birthday
- 52 years, 113 days
- 5.2.113
The day they turn 53 they ship 5.3.0 — a minor bump, backwards compatible. At 60 it’s 6.0.0, a major release, and everyone agrees those are the hard ones. February 29 birthdays get March 1 in the other three years. Future dates are skipped rather than counted backwards.
Jobs
The Work Edition anchors on a start date instead. YEARS is completed years in the seat. QUARTERS is which quarter of your own tenure year you’re in, 1 to 4 — counted in three-month steps from your start date, not from January, so starting on 10 February means quarter 2 begins on 10 May. DAYS counts Monday to Friday since that quarter began, with no holiday calendar, and a quarter always starts at zero. After the +, BUILD is every business day ever logged — a birthday resets, tenure accrues.
If an anniversary lands past the end of a month it rolls forward: three months after 31 January is 1 May. Everything uses the calendar of whoever is looking.
Everything is in the URL
Names, dates, the theme, and on a card the note and who it’s from — all of it is read out of the address bar and nowhere else. There is no account, no database, no record, nothing to delete. Bookmark a link and it keeps working; the numbers are recalculated from the day you open it.
/birthday/?theme=fridge&p=Jamie:1974-01-15&p=Sara:1976-03-20
Which also means you can edit one by hand. Fix a typo in a name by fixing it in the URL. And it means a link is exactly as private as you make it: whoever holds it can read it, and pass it on.
Themes
Twenty of them here, each a single stylesheet with no JavaScript at all — deliberately, because a theme that could run code could also read the dates in your URL and send them somewhere. Everything a theme needs comes from a handful of generic hooks. Browse them, or see them carrying real people. Nine more are about jobs and live in the Work Edition.
This site has a version number too
It shipped on 1 May 2026, so it has an age, so it has a number: 0.0.0. It is the shortest explanation of the whole site, and it stays true without anybody maintaining it.