ShipReq OSS announcement · GitHub

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japgolly/shipreq_oss_ann.md

Created<br>May 19, 2026 02:57

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ShipReq OSS announcement

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shipreq_oss_ann.md

Today, I'm open-sourcing my life's work and magnum opus: ShipReq.

What is ShipReq

ShipReq is a SaaS/webapp for storing and managing project requirements, tasks, and issues.<br>It's like a highly configurable combination of JIRA, Excel, and Word, plus new and innovative features not found anywhere else.

It was born out of frustration working in an environment where Excel and Word were used for requirements, and everything fell out of date, and was hard to keep correct.<br>ShipReq makes certain classes of errors impossible, and other types of errors trackable.<br>For example, you can write Use Cases such that all the links between steps always stay correct as intended;<br>you even get a graph of steps to make it easier to comprehend.

It's written in full-stack Scala using Scala.js, and is nearly all pure functional programming.<br>It is extremely well tested, both the backend and the UI.<br>The main frontend is a massive SPA which only talks to the server to receive real-time updates or save changes, meaning that all navigation happens locally and is always very fast.<br>Rather than apps like JIRA loading an issue at a time, ShipReq is more like git in that the entire repo is loaded client-side.

Journey and Crisis

I started work on this back in 2013. I wanted to both take a chance at self-employment, and solve problems I'd experienced working with large teams.<br>Young and naive, my plan was to live off my savings, create the perfect product, and then seek paid users.<br>It was important to me to get the foundations right, rather than churn out a quick MVP.

I open-sourced a lot of my work along the way, resulting in libraries like scalajs-react, scalacss, test-state, etc.

And so I worked on ShipReq and OSS for a few years, did a few years of paid work to pay the bills, then covid hit and I spent years working on this again.

After the covid years, a number of areas of my life collapsed. There were multiple family tragedies (including deaths), I went through a bad divorce, my health suffered and I went to hospital more times than I can count, and I was diagnosed as having multiple disabilities.<br>I ended up taking two years off from programming and blew through all of my life's savings.<br>I've been looking for a job for over eight months since, with no luck, partly because my interview skills are impacted by my disabilities, and partly because my recent years have been dedicated to open-source and independent R&D rather than traditional corporate employment.<br>I fear I may never get a job again.

Now I find myself on the disability pension with an abundance of free time on my hands, and no life purpose.<br>I've therefore decided to continue work on ShipReq, and to open-source it.<br>Open-sourcing wasn't an easy decision but it's the only one that makes sense,...