Shipping Calendearing

For when you have too many calendars

Once upon a time I built a calendar and then wrote an exhaustively long talk about working with time, timezones, calendars, and everything in between. For a few unrelated reasons we ended up not shipping the calendar, but in general, as I mentioned in the post:

Zach, whatever you do: just don’t ever build a calendar.

Anyway, I built a calendar again! Okay, technically I got away with only tangentially building a calendar this time around, but it’s the thought that counts.

Partner-driven development

There’s dogfooding where you write software to scratch your own itch. I’m going to just invent the term “Partner-driven development” for the times where you’ve said multiple times you’re going to write something and then your wife/husband/partner keeps complaining that indeed, that was bullshit and why haven’t you built the thing you said you were going to do years ago yes I realize software is sort of hard but you keep saying it would be easy to whip together and yet here we are, not in fact using it?

As a calendar sicko who spends too much time thinking about calendars over the last decade, I sync like a dozen different calendars to my phone and desktop: a personal calendar, a calendar for a nonprofit I work with, a couple calendars for Tifo and Signed — yes, Signed is also shipping shortly — various soccer calendars for Oakland Roots, Tottenham, Dortmund, USMNT & USWNT, events I’m going to from Luma and Partiful, and so on. And yeah, my wife Monica did, on occasion, give me some well-deserved gruff for making it pretty difficult to track when I have something going on without having to sync all of those calendars to her own calendar anddddd… it was a mess.

Your endearing calendar

So it’s something I always wanted to build in a Do One Thing Well app: add the URLs of all your calendar feeds and dump out a single feed for my wife to subscribe to and get visibility on my schedule. So that’s what Calendearing is. You get it? It’s an endearing calendar! Sometimes typos while writing code turn into realizing a .com is available and the hellhole that is Naming A Company ends up being three minutes instead of six months.

It’s $30/year, and merging calendars is all it does. Nothing more, nothing less. There’s no crypto, no advertising, no VC treadmill, no AI models powering the thing. WYSIWYG.

I love angel investing, I love building venture-scale products, but I really miss side projects, too. My start to the industry was 25 years ago when I built Good-Tutorials, which housed the most tutorials for Photoshop and other software in the world for well over a decade. I read well over 100,000 submitted links over the years (and yet, I still never became very good at Photoshop; imagine that). I sold it not too long after joining GitHub, but I do miss those days of having something small and just yours to work on and learn from. And god, I haven’t had this much fun just building since Rails came out twenty years ago.

So yeah, if you have calendar problems, well, I have the solution: don’t build a calendar. Oh and then use Calendearing if it’s of interest to you.