dewski

All new features are gated behind feature flags that progress from the developing team, to all GitHub employees, then to public over a multi-week span. Larger changes like this one have an internal discussion post shared with the company and a changelog entry once published.

That totally works if it is rare for you! The last 2 months I've had a few things I've added to my personal calendar that synced with work calendar: lunch with a family member, dropping off or picking up car from service, haircuts, contractor stopping by, dentist, vet appointment, etc. It's nice to not worry about it since it marks me as Busy right when I create the event.

But not everyone uses their work calendar for personal reasons, some prefer to keep their personal commitments private.

Don't Double Book Me isn't some crazy startup idea that needs funding, I am not shooting for the moon with this. Feature development was basically done in a few weekends and I like that it solves a single problem well. There is definitely a market for people who need a tool like this. Look at Reclaim, Calendly, Clockwise, CalendarBridge, OneCal, etc, which have successfully tapped into this market but are focused on selling to teams.

I designed it for individuals balancing personal and professional commitments. I work somewhere with a heavy meeting culture, nothing I can really do about that. I found myself double booked often with personal commitments I had. Consider a scenario where you need to attend your child’s school play, but you forgot to also block off time on your work calendar, now your colleagues think you’re free and invite you to something. You've been double booked.

Events outside your working hours aren’t synced, protecting your personal time and privacy. The default setting is to create events on a destination calendar with the summary explicitly being "Busy" without any other information, but you can change it so it mirrors the event details should you choose.

A few weeks ago I got the chance to check out the Google Calendar API for the first time and was very impressed how thorough it is.

- Very easy to retrieve incremental changes to events on a calendar

- Webhooks to be notified when calendars are created, updated, or removed

- Webhooks to be notified when events are added, updated, or removed on a calendar

- Bulk requests

- Select only the fields you need from the event

- Querying events in a calendar with custom properties (I use this so I don’t need to store anything on my side)

Funnily enough to build a sync between my personal calendar and work calendar, and for my wife and I to have a combined calendar for our own personal commitments. I also feed in a few calendars I subscribe to for sporting events to our shared calendar. $100 a year was a bit much for a feature that should be in Google Calendar already. I named it Don’t Double Book Me, felt appropriate.

I only started exploring the Google Calendar API recently after realizing that Reclaim’s policy allows Enterprise customers to take over other individual paying accounts associated with the Enterprise, effectively making it not really my Reclaim account anymore. Didn’t help I wasn’t notified of this either.

It's a fair critique! I still keep kicking the can down the road about revisiting the project and modernizing it. The ecosystem has moved along so much since I last revisited it I'll need to take a fresh look at it, accepting the PRs that are currently open is likely out of the question.

> Interest in the ecosystem is shrinking and this is one symptom.

I think the interest in the ecosystem is still very strong, there is just more publicity and marketing around the newest frameworks and capturing peoples attention. Rails is more than ever the best place to go zero to one, and still scaling past 100M at GitHub.

There are so many libraries that are largely feature complete. For example, Devise doesn't need anymore features. There is some traction of going the more lazaronixon/authentication-zero route which is a generator for owning the code rather than having everything live in a gem. This is just one specific example. Rails is moving more and more third party things in house showing it matured in the ecosystem and can move into core Rails.

I find myself reaching to a gem as a last resort if at all possible these days.

This is a bad take.

Imagine your obituary being hidden behind a paywall.

We do.

As a big Postico fan, wanted to share Postico 2 is in development and coming out soon. I've been using it for a few weeks now. Highly recommend.

I’ve built something like this and stored the diff regions in PostGIS, really easy way to build a visual diff search tool using bounding boxes.