01 — Tool
Tool
A thing you use that does not get consumed. An awl, a cast-iron pan, a #7 jointer plane, a fermentation vessel.
example: "round awl · Osborne #477 · sharpened 2025-12"
Field notes — 2026, ed. 02
A working reference for documenting physical practice.
HideSync is a free, locally-hosted PM/ERP for makers, artisans, and small workshops. It tracks your tools, materials, techniques, workflows, projects, and events with full lineage, and stores everything as portable JSON manifests in a folder you own. It is also the reference implementation of OPG-L 0.6, the open standard Rillmark builds on.
Three-service stack, running on your machine. Windows and Linux.
§ 01 · Why this
If you have ever documented your craft in a spreadsheet, a Notion database, a dead app, or a folder of PDFs that only you can parse, you know what HideSync is for. It is not a cloud, not a subscription, not a walled garden.
HideSync is three small services that run on your machine. They write JSON manifests into a Git-tracked folder you choose. Those files are yours. They remain readable in any text editor long after any version of this software has stopped shipping updates.
You will recognise it, we hope, as something made by someone who does the thing.
01 — Local
No server. No account.
Runs on your laptop. Data never leaves unless you choose to share a project. If the house loses internet, the shop keeps working.
02 — Legible
Readable without us.
Every record is a JSON manifest in a Git-tracked folder. Open it in any
editor. Diff it with git. Back it up with rsync. The schema is OPG-L 0.6, an open standard.
03 — Unhurried
A fifty-year project.
The point isn't to raise and exit. The point is to still be around when your apprentice's apprentice opens your notebook.
§ 02 · The primitives
Six building blocks. Enough to describe almost any physical practice.
A kind of grammar
The hard part of documenting a craft isn't writing things down. It's naming the things worth writing about. HideSync picks six, just six, and uses them consistently. They're small enough to keep in your head and general enough to fit leatherwork, kitchen work, wood, metal, fibre, and fermentation. These are the primitives of OPG-L 0.6, the same six that any conformant implementation must support, whatever its surface.
02 — Material
Material
A thing you use up. Leather, wood, flour, wax, pigment, thread, solder. Tracked by origin and lot when that matters.
example: "Wickett & Craig · 8oz · nat. russet · hide #A-104"
03 — Technique
Technique
A repeatable way of doing something. Saddle stitch, pâte brisée, dovetail layout, brine cure. The unit of learned skill.
example: "saddle stitch · 6 spi · angled awl"
04 — Workflow
Workflow
An ordered sequence of techniques applied to materials using tools. A recipe, a cut list, a build order.
example: "card-holder, v3 · 14 steps · ~3.5h"
05 — Project
Project
What you set out to make, and the plan for making it. The bag for your sister, Sunday's loaf, the chair you're halfway through.
example: "commission · M. Reyes belt · due 2026-05"
06 — Event
Event
A dated record of work actually done. Sharpening. Receiving a hide. Finishing a project. The doing that ties history together.
example: "2026-02-14 · stropped awl · felt pull again"
01
Tool
A thing you use that does not get consumed.
An awl, a cast-iron pan, a #7 jointer plane.
02
Material
A thing you use up.
Leather, wood, flour, wax, pigment, thread.
03
Technique
A repeatable way of doing something.
Saddle stitch, pâte brisée, dovetail layout, brine cure.
04
Workflow
An ordered sequence of techniques applied to materials using tools.
A recipe, a cut list, a build order.
05
Project
What you set out to make, and the plan for making it.
The bag for your sister, Sunday's loaf, the chair you're halfway through.
06
Event
A dated record of work actually done.
Sharpening. Receiving a hide. Finishing a project.
§ 03 · The commons
A shared layer of knowledge that no one owns.
Structural, not optional
Underneath your local files sits a proto-commons, a public catalogue of techniques, tools, and materials that lives on GitHub today. Think: the dictionary, not the printing press. Every entry is attributed, versioned, and free to fork.
The knowledge of how to make things belongs to the people who make things.
The commons is the reason the primitives exist in the form they do: named the same way by a leatherworker in Porto and a knife-maker in Osaka, so their notes can cross the gap between crafts without losing precision.
Commons publication is opt-in per record. Use HideSync at private visibility indefinitely; the proto-commons grows only from what you explicitly publish.
When the Foundation is established, the proto-commons migrates into the full Commons, stewarded by the Rillmark Commons Foundation under the OPG-L standard. The catalogue's substance (the named techniques, the cited references, the contributors' attributions) carries forward unchanged. More on Rillmark's two-layer structure →
§ 04 · Your files
A folder of JSON manifests. Versioned, portable, yours.
Readable without the app.
HideSync writes JSON manifests into a Git-tracked folder you choose. One file per record. The folder layout mirrors the primitives. The schema is OPG-L 0.6, an open standard, portable to any conformant implementation that exists or will exist. If HideSync vanishes tomorrow, your archive still opens in any editor, diffs in any git client, and parses in any JSON tool.
Version it with Git (it already is, manifest-as-source-of-truth). Back it up with the same tool you use for everything else. Share a single project folder with a collaborator by email or pull request. Nothing about this requires us.
tools/ round-awl.json # Tool — inherited from grandfather osborne-477-pricking.json ... materials/ wickett-craig/ a-104.json # 8oz nat. russet, 2025-11 a-107.json techniques/ saddle-stitch.json # with variants & spi table edge-burnish.json workflows/ card-holder-v3.json # 14 steps projects/ 2026-m-reyes-belt/ manifest.json events/ 2026-04-02-cut.json 2026-04-03-stitched.json commons/ # symlinked, read-only → ~/hidesync/commons/
§ 05 · A note
From the bench.
Signed, dated
I studied mechatronics and computer science for three semesters, then left. Leather is where I landed: self-taught, badly at first and better now, for about ten years. What the lecture halls left me came along, into the craft and later into this tool. I built a version of this software for myself some time ago. It worked. Then it stopped working, because I had made it the way someone makes a thing for themselves: quickly, with shortcuts, with every decision I regretted still in the code.
So I started over. This time with the patience that the subject deserves. The primitives came from watching what I actually did in the shop and what I actually wrote in the margins of my notebooks. They're not a clever framework. They're the smallest set that kept showing up.
HideSync is free, and will remain free; Ko-fi tips are welcome, but nothing is ever gated. If you use it and it helps you, I would like to hear about it. If you use it and it frustrates you, I would like to hear about that more. Write: [email protected].
— Pascal
Founder · self-taught leatherworker
Founder · self-taught leatherworker
§ 06 · A door
HideSync is the working part of a larger thesis. For the architecture, the
two-layer institutional structure, the federation model, and the partners
Rillmark is looking for, read on at Rillmark.
Read the Rillmark thesis →