Skillbased Versioning (SBVer)
A tongue-in-cheek superset of Semantic Versioning that publicly shames any release made after a project's declared 'perfection' point.
🔗 Visit Skillbased Versioning (SBVer)
Description
If you've ever wondered why software keeps shipping updates after its makers call it 'done,' Skillbased Versioning turns that question into a joke with real teeth. It's a versioning scheme — the rules that decide what a release number like 2.3.1 means — built on top of the industry-standard Semantic Versioning. The twist: a project can declare a 'Perfection Sentinel' at version 1.3.37, marking the point where the maintainer swears it's finished. Any version released after that gets tagged DISHONORABLE, with the release number itself encoding how many times the maintainer broke their promise.
Technically, SBVer is fully backward-compatible with SemVer 2.0.0, meaning any tool that understands normal version numbers can still parse SBVer releases without special support. It adds a 'shame score' calculated from post-sentinel releases, uses repeating-digit patterns to encode dishonorable release counts, and supports the same pre-release and build metadata as SemVer. It's an open-source project (CC BY 3.0 license) on GitHub, positioned half as satire of scope creep in software and half as an actually usable, functional versioning convention for projects that want to make a point about stability.
💬 Our review
The short version: this is genuinely funny and also genuinely usable — but it's a niche, opinionated joke tool, not something to adopt for a serious production project without your whole team being in on the bit.
Compared to standard SemVer, which SBVer fully implements as a superset, the only real difference is the shame-scoring mechanism layered on top — so there's zero technical risk in adopting it, any SemVer-aware tooling still works. Compared to CalVer (date-based versioning), SBVer solves a completely different problem: CalVer tells you when a release happened, SBVer comments on whether the maintainer kept a promise. The honest caveat is that this is a satire project first and a practical tool second — it works, but you're choosing it to make a point (about scope creep, about 'done' software) rather than because it solves a versioning problem SemVer doesn't already solve. Pick it for a personal project, a joke library, or a team that will appreciate the humor; stick with plain SemVer for anything client-facing.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Free and open-source (CC BY 3.0). No pricing tiers.
Pros
Fully backward-compatible with SemVer 2.0.0 — zero tooling risk
Free and open-source under CC BY 3.0
Genuinely functional, not just a joke — includes a real specification
Simple to adopt: no new tooling required beyond understanding the convention
Cons
Niche/satirical framing means it's a hard sell for serious or client-facing projects
No tooling ecosystem (linters, badges, CI integrations) built around it yet
Solves a problem (scope-creep shaming) most teams don't actually have
Requires the whole team to be comfortable with the joke to be worth adopting