An encyclopedia, not an app.

Barcoder is an attempt to collect, in one place, every QR code, barcode and visual-code standard in active use across payments, retail, transit and government — and to cross-reference each one with the wallets, schemes and rails that depend on it. The goal is reference quality. Wikipedia is the obvious comparison.

The information is already out there, scattered across central bank press releases, ISO/IEC drafts, scheme operator documentation, vendor whitepapers, and the dry pages of payment regulators. The work is to gather it, normalize it, and present it so a reader can answer questions like: “What does a Bakong KHQR look like, and what does it have in common with Singapore's SGQR?”

The method

The content lives in markdown files in a git repository. Country reports are written long-form into reports/. Skills under .claude/skills/ extract per-standard and per-country pages into docs/. The FastAPI backend reads those files and the Next.js frontend renders them. There is no database. The repo is the encyclopedia.

This approach has a property worth naming: every page on this site is reproducible from a single, reviewable change in the source repository. There is no hidden editor state, no admin panel, no production-only edits. If you can read this, you can read the source.

Status

The research corpus covers 197 countries with 290 standards and 1000+ wallet biographies extracted, and the web frontend is at version 0.1 — see PLAN.md in the repository for the live roadmap.