About Salience

Salience is Home Assistant for your dev tools — an ambient pane that lives on your second monitor, calm until something needs your attention.

It was inspired by two things: a recent contract where I essentially worked as a one-man scrum team, and Home Assistant.

Over a few weeks, I was late for a handful of meetings. I got up on time, got ready on time, got into my car on time. And when I started the car, the fuel gauge informed me I didn't have enough fuel to make it to the meeting. A detour to the petrol station — late again.

My car has a phone app, my calendar lives online, and my house has smart lights. Each lives in its own silo. Home Assistant brings those three silos into a single place, and makes this possible:

When I turn my lights on in a morning, if the meeting in my calendar is further away than my remaining fuel will take me — turn the lights red.

It's unobtrusive. It isn't a one-time notification I can swipe away and forget. It's information that already exists, brought to me instead of me having to go and find it. Most importantly, with enough time to act on it. So I'm not late - again.

Working as a one-man scrum team was exhausting. I was drowning in tabs and windows: IDEs, terminals, Teams, email, Docker, Jira, Bitbucket, TeamCity, AWS, Sentry. Context switching meant another set of everything.

Many of those tabs existed to repeat the same actions — run the tests, SSH into an instance, run a migration. The rest existed to answer questions whose answers lived across several tools at once: Is my Jira ticket in sync with my work? What caused that Sentry issue? What's actually deployed right now?

Just as Home Assistant doesn't replace my calendar or my car's app, Salience doesn't replace any of those tools. It replaces the tabs - and the questions with answers. A red light at just the right time.