Calmaker is a calendar generator I built to export time tables from my school’s Workday SIS into a standard .ics file that can be imported into any calendar application.

Motivation

I built this because digital calendars are awesome, and Workday (to my knowledge) has no way to export your class schedule to one. Making calendar events for long-lived recurring events is annoying, especially if your schedule changes, so I made a tool to automate it. It’s the classic tale of spending 10 hours to automate a 10 minute task - except I probably spent quite a bit more time on it than that.

Personal Remarks

This app was my first real React project, and I learned a lot about React and the React ecosystem while building it. Vite is soooo nice to work with. I had held off learning React earlier due to how intimidating the tooling was with tools like Webpack, and how flaky create-react-app seemed to be.

The importance of thorough testing - both automated and manual - also became very clear to me while developing Calmaker. In the first release of the app, the calendar output had not been configured to account for daylight savings time. Even better, I had not noticed this until a bunch of people had already used it. Whoops. To prevent future regressions, I implemented automated testing with Vitest and was able to fix all the issues with the tool.

Finally, I have so much respect for devs who deal with dates, time, and “standard” formats that aren’t so standard in practice. By far the biggest pain point in this project was just creating the ics file. There were so many strange behaviors that would happen on certain calendar platforms as a result of slightly misconfiguring the ics. Timezones and daylight savings also kept biting me in all sorts of frustrating ways, where the first/last day of events just wouldn’t be correct, or alternate schedule days wouldn’t generate properly.