600 changes later: what a year of building Hemp'in looks like

Last week we merged pull request number 599. The one after it is this article.

A pull request is one change to the site: a fix, a feature, a page, sometimes a single sentence that was wrong. Six hundred of them is a good moment to stop and look back, because the pile tells a story we never wrote down in one place.

It starts on 22 October 2025, with a prototype exported from Figma and a first commit. Since then: 1,057 commits, 188 database tables, and two months — May and August 2026 — where the work never seemed to stop. Here are the five things all that work was for.

1. A map of hemp law, country by country

The Atlas began as a question every hemp business asks sooner or later: can I actually do this here?

Today it covers 197 countries with 2,125 facts, and every single one carries its source. We seeded the big markets first (Germany, the US, Canada, the UK, Italy), then worked through the regions where the answer is "no", like the prohibition countries of South-East Asia, because a "no" with a citation is worth as much as a "yes".

The Atlas also remembers. Laws change, so facts have dates, and you can ask what the rules were at a point in the past, not only what they are today. The whole value chain is in scope, not just CBD: fibre, food, building materials, seed.

1. A directory worth arriving at

There are 630 active companies on Hemp'in today, and 223 places: farms, processors, shops, museums. Behind those numbers sits a lot of unglamorous work: a company wizard, a way to claim your own page, a verification ladder that means what it says, brand pages with their own logo and banner, a storefront, an events calendar, and a marketplace where you can post what you're looking for.

One of our favourite pull request titles from the summer is "The company page, worth arriving at". That was the bar for every page: if someone lands on it from a search or a shared link, it should be worth the click.

1. A place to talk, and now to publish

A directory is a phone book. A community is people coming back. So a large part of the 600 went into the human side: profiles, Discover, messages, discussions, connection requests that reach the right person, and a feed where you can post updates, comment and support each other.

BUD, our guide, learned to answer questions. Quests stopped being locks and became invitations: nothing on the site is gated behind a level just to make you click.

And this week the newest piece arrived: Hemp'in News, a magazine where any member can publish an article that goes live straight away. When you publish, a post announcing it lands in the feed for everyone to see. You can bring your LinkedIn posts over too, into their own section. This article is the first one written for the 600th pull request.

1. Safe by default, honest by habit

Some of the pull requests we're proudest of are the ones nobody sees. Security audits. Credentials taken out of the code. Every data rule checked against the live database, not against what we thought we'd written. Account deletion that actually deletes.

And honesty about our own numbers. Two titles from August say it better than we can: "Analytics truth — the 58% was wrong", and "The only demand we ever had was our own test". When the data told us something unflattering, we fixed the dashboard rather than the story. When a billing bug charged people during their free year, we stopped it at both layers and said so.

If a number on Hemp'in is wrong, we would rather say so than keep it.

1. In your language, on your phone

The hemp industry doesn't only speak English. Hemp'in now speaks French across its public pages, with a language switch in your settings, and more languages are on the way, each one checked by a person before it goes live.

The site installs on your phone like an app and keeps you in the loop by email without drowning you in it: a letter from the team, a note when someone comments on your post, and an unsubscribe link that always works.

How it was built

Hemp'in is built by a very small team working alongside AI coding agents. Almost every one of those 1,057 commits was written with Claude, and every one was reviewed and shipped by a person. We plan in the open too: a live board of what's being built, what's blocked and what's next.

It means a small team can move like a big one, and it means we write everything down, which is how this look back was even possible.

What's next

The next 600 are about you coming back. More writers on News. More languages. Better ways to find the right partner, buyer or farm. And numbers we're willing to publish about who returns and who posts, because that is the only measure of a community that counts.

If you have a story from the hemp industry, write it for Hemp'in News. If you've already written it on LinkedIn, bring it over.

Thank you for being part of the first 600.