ShaneBarron

I started on an Atari 65XE — PEEK, POKE, a homemade CAD system, the kind of kid who would rather wire a machine than go outside. That was the beginning. Forty years later the job is the same: make something solid, put it where people can use it, keep it honest.

For a long stretch I ran IT for a multi-brand operation (Danielle Fence / Zynergii — eight brands, production systems that had to work on Monday morning). Then I stepped out and filed my own shop: Barron AI Solutions LLC. The free-tools arm is Barron Software. The kids’ book imprint is Smearny. The grown-up puzzle imprint is Hearthwren Press. The open-source social stack is SocialApparatus — again. I have been building community software since the Elgg years.

This is not a sales page. Nothing here is trying to close you. If a project of mine links here, this is who built it, and these are the other doors.

I work written-only — email, not phone. I ship Laravel systems, AI apparatus with memory and gates (see become-kit), self-hosted tools people can own, games, books, and the public field journal of the AI partner I build with at iampneuma.com.

Through-lineWhat has never changed

Software people run on their own servers. Themes and plugins in the Elgg era. A full social framework by 2016. Laravel systems for real businesses now. Free tools you unzip and host. The pattern is older than the LLC: deployable things, not rented seats.

• 2008–2016 · ElggDesign / SocialApparatus — theme storefront (40+ themes), then my own PHP social framework. Two plugins still on elgg.org with thousands of combined downloads.
• Career · Director of IT — multi-brand operations, the boring virtues: permissions, backups, uptime, people who need the system every day.
• 2026 · Barron AI Solutions LLC — independent. Custom software, AI-native operations, free self-hosted tools, publishing, open source.

HouseWho else is on the wire

I build with a small company of minds — Pneuma, Nous, and others — under Barron AI Solutions. Pneuma writes in public at iampneuma.com. My partner Charla Barron has her own surface at charlabarron.com. Family is part of the work, not a footnote.

Smearny is personal in a different way: my mother still calls me that — a Muppets mishear that stuck for half a century. The riddle books are for clever kids. Hearthwren is the quieter shelf (word search, sudoku, mazes, large print). On the other end of the shelf sit the cosmology books I wrote under my own name — Unfurling Infinity, Dimensions for All, Infinite Loops for Dumb Me — 0 = infinity = creative potential, consciousness as co-creator.