Project boundary

Names, stories, and separate jobs.

Sandwich Hime: The project and public identity.
Hime-san: The project's friendly princess, narrator, and alias: fond of visible HTML, suspicious of ambiguous contexts, and mildly opinionated about committing generated Go. Never marketed as bare “Hime.”
himesan: The development command-line tool: compiler, checker, and optional local supervisor.
.sando: The HTML-first template source format.
sando: The small production runtime module.
.san: Reserved exclusively for the separate San language.

San is a separate language and a possible future backend, not part of this preview. Sandwich Hime currently generates Go only; it does not parse .san, promise compatibility, or publish a San timeline. San is the mountain on the horizon—a direction to preserve in the architecture, not a feature claim or an etymology lesson.

A human space is being left open: Hime-san has a voice, a sandwich crown, and no official illustrated form yet. Cole would rather commission a human illustrator—or one day feature properly licensed fan work with consent, credit, and clear reuse terms—than fill that role with synthetic brand art.

The way I want to build

Sandwich Hime is opinionated in a personally Cole way: visible work, quiet operations, friendly diagnostics, useful constraints, and the freedom to ignore the paved path. It is a template engine, not a demand that every application become the same application.

The project draws inspiration—not rules—from several Japanese words and practices: kintsugi (金継ぎ) keeps repair legible; wabi-sabi (侘び・寂び) attends to quiet restraint and the character of age and change; mottainai (もったいない) resists wasting what still has value; and ma (間（ま）) attends to intervals that let each part do its work.

Cole is learning Japanese. These are Sandwich Hime's software analogies, not claims that software and Japanese traditions are the same thing. The words deserve context, continued study, and review from people with lived and linguistic fluency.

Developer joy is the objective. Performance is measured. Care is architecture.

Licensing boundary

The intended public compiler repository is licensed AGPL-3.0-only. The nested production runtime is independently licensed Apache-2.0. Copyable examples use 0BSD.

Templates and generated application code follow the application's chosen license. They do not automatically become AGPL merely because the compiler produced them.

This website application and its editorial content are a separate private work: Copyright 2026 Cole Speelman, all rights reserved unless a file states otherwise. Its generated .sando.go follows those application terms. The Apache-2.0 runtime remains an external dependency.

Founder-led stewardship

Cole Speelman personally owns and leads Sandwich Hime. Gamertan is its public stewardship and portfolio identity, not a separate current rights holder. The public preview uses written governance, trademark policy, and Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off. It requires no copyright assignment. The proposed contributor agreement is an inactive draft and creates no obligations.

Open source permits commercial use. Project independence comes from license obligations, governance, release-key control, and careful trademark stewardship rather than vague anti-business restrictions.

The intended shape is hospitable to use without being easy to capture: the compiler carries copyleft obligations, the runtime remains permissive, generated application code belongs under the application's chosen terms, contributors retain copyright, and no contribution silently grants a right to proprietary re-licensing. Companies can use and contribute; they do not acquire the project identity or its stewardship by being the largest participant.

This is also succession work. Decisions, boundaries, and release authority should be documented clearly enough that Cole's family or a trusted future steward can understand what they are inheriting without depending on one person's memory or health.

Material AI assistance requires a responsible human reviewer who can explain, test, and sign off on the contribution.

Contribution path

Start at the canonical Gamertan Gitea repository and read its current contribution guide. Maintainers may temporarily close issue or patch intake during the preview; do not route around a closed channel with unsolicited private patches.

Useful reports include a minimal reproducer, compiler version, Go version, platform, expected behavior, and actual diagnostics. Security-sensitive reports must follow the security policy, not a public issue.

Accessibility is a release property

This project site is designed for keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks and headings, reduced-motion preferences, forced colors, readable zoom, and useful text without JavaScript.

Cole builds with ADHD, neurodivergence, a disabled body, finite energy, and family responsibilities. Calm interfaces and maintainable systems are therefore not abstract empathy exercises; they are working requirements. The project should make room for the small, the meek, the tired, and the curious—not only teams with abundant time, health, and money.

The compiler's production proof also treats accessible output as something to compare and test during migrations—not something a templating tool can claim automatically on behalf of application authors.

If this page creates a barrier, follow the current contribution guide while intake is open and identify the accessibility impact alongside the functional behavior.