Why our changelog has no version numbers
4.12.1 tells a customer nothing. The date is the anchor, and an entry that cannot be written as a difference to someone's day does not belong in a changelog at all.
Our changelog has dates and no version numbers. That is a decision, not an oversight.
A version number is for us, not for you
4.12.1 is a coordinate in our release process. It tells you nothing about
whether anything you care about changed. Worse, it invites the wrong question
— which version am I on? — when the honest answer for a hosted product is
always the current one.
The date is the anchor instead. It is the thing a person actually remembers: that changed sometime last week.
The harder rule
Every entry has to say what changed and what you can do now. Never why it works, never how it was built. An entry that cannot be written as a difference to somebody's day does not go in the changelog at all.
That rule removes a lot. Refactors, infrastructure, internal tooling — real work, all of it, and none of it belongs on a page a customer reads to find out whether their afternoon got easier.
The thinking behind the work goes here, on the blog, where there is room for it.