About

Built by a developer, for developers.

Heliostat is made by Sean Reed at Reedster LLC. One person, shipping the tool they wanted to exist.

Why "Heliostat"?

The sun moves. The beam stays on target.

A heliostat is a mirror that tracks the sun and steers its light onto a fixed receiver. The sun never stops moving — the mirror just keeps doing the math so the energy always lands where it should.

That's the job of this app. Interruptions happen. Estimates drift. Life shows up. Heliostat is the mirror: it keeps re-aiming your attention at what you committed to building, so you can keep shipping even when the conditions around you are moving.

› Stay focused on building — not on keeping track of the building.

About Sean

Full-stack developer and AI engineer — most comfortable living inside Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, and a Postgres console. I build small, opinionated products that solve problems I've actually hit.

I enjoy using Shape Up at work, but it doesn't really extend to solo projects — there's no team to pitch to, no betting table, no cool-down you can actually take. I built Heliostat to bring a Shape-Up-shaped experience into my personal projects, so I can stay focused, ship the tool I set out to build, and not get lost on the way.

Off the keyboard I ski uphill, climb on rock, and log trail miles. Available for freelance work and interesting collaborations — book time or find me on GitHub.

What is Heliostat?

Heliostat is Shape Up for solo developers. You pitch ideas, commit to a fixed-length cycle, track scopes on a hill chart, and reflect in cooldown — all in one workspace, with commits auto-linking to scopes when you wire up a GitHub repo.

Pitch ideas with a T-shirt size first — a time budget, not an estimate.
Commit to a cycle length and the pitches you'll actually ship.
Build against a hill chart; commits auto-link to scopes; unmatched work is flagged as interruptions.
Cooldown with a 3-question retrospective and a cleanup list before the next pitch.

Curious about the method itself? Read how Heliostat uses Shape Up.

Dog-fooding

I run my own projects through Heliostat. Every cycle, every retro, every interruption — logged here. Some of what it's tracking right now:

iSkiUphill

Uphill-skiing resort policies and access.

csv-api

Turn any CSV file into a live REST API.

rules-hammer

Draft, review, and ship organizational rules.

Xpiry

Certificate and domain expiry monitoring.

Tech stack

Boring, well-worn, chosen to be one person's fault.

Ruby on Rails PostgreSQL Redis Sidekiq Tailwind CSS Hotwire Devise Pundit Stripe Resend Sentry OpenAI

Start here

Ready to run your next cycle?

Invite-only beta. Drop your email and we'll be in touch.