Byline
About Byline
Byline is a verified work ledger. It reads the work you already did — your commits, pull requests, and reviews — and writes a record of it, one entry per week, with every entry citing the artifacts it came from.
You use the ledger to write your self-review, to keep a public page of your work current, and to hold a record that is yours. Your employer sees nothing you do not publish.
Who runs it
Byline is built and run by Alex Ray, an independent developer. There is no larger company behind it. Questions, bug reports, and press enquiries go to one inbox: hello@withbyline.com.
How it works
- You sign in with GitHub. Byline asks for personal read scopes only. It never reads your organization's data.
- Byline synthesizes draft entries from your activity. You approve, edit, or discard each one.
- Each approved entry keeps its citations. A claim that cannot be cited is dropped.
- You publish entries one at a time to your public page at withbyline.com/u/<handle>. You can unpublish at any time.
- Colleagues can vouch for specific work. Vouch text is written by the voucher and cannot be edited by you.
The rules
- Byline never publishes on your behalf.
- Byline never sells your data and never shows your ledger to your employer.
- Machine actions can only keep or reduce visibility. Widening visibility is always your explicit act.
- Your code never leaves your machine. The collector uploads commit metadata at a tier you choose; see /data for the exact payload.
Local and open options
If you want none of this in the cloud, withbyline-local runs the whole ledger on your own machine with no Byline account. The collector, withbyline, is the same tool in both modes.