Heliostat is made by Sean Reed at Reedster LLC. One person, shipping the tool they wanted to exist.
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.
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 cooldown 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 — find me on GitHub.
Heliostat is Shape Up for solo developers. You think loose ideas in a mind-map, pitch the ones worth shaping, 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.
Curious about the method itself? Read how Heliostat uses Shape Up.
I run my own projects through Heliostat. Every cycle, every retro, every interruption — logged here. Some of what it's tracking right now:
Boring, well-worn, chosen to be one person's fault.
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