I’ve been working on Don’t Double Book Me (https://dontdoublebookme.com) the past few weeks out of frustration with keeping my personal and work Google Calendars in sync.
Previously used Reclaim but found $10 a month to keep 2 calendars in sync was excessive and the software was increasingly becoming more team oriented, no longer for individuals. Felt like I was paying for a product and also the product. I just needed to keep 2 calendars in sync, not smart meetings, analytics, integrations, etc. ideally I set it up and forget about it.
I really needed a way to sync my calendars privately, without all the extras. Now that Dropbox has purchased Reclaim, it's even more important I feel like my calendars are not spied on. I knew I could provide a similar service.
Here’s what makes me excited about it as a user:
Affordable: Just $20/year with a 7-day free trial. Cancel at any time for a pro-rated refund.
Privacy First: No need to store events on a servers enabling unlimited calendar syncs.
Working Hours: Adaptive feature that adjusts if an event falls outside your specified working hours.
Round Event Times: Opt to round event start and end times to the nearest 15 or 30 minutes for cleaner scheduling.
Invitations: Block time between calendars when you receive a meeting invitation that you haven't responded to yet. Decline it? The time block on your other calendar is removed.
My plan is to keep it small and focused, while also listening to user feedback for how you'd like to manage your personal and work calendars more efficiently.
I don’t have a personal calendar and my work calendar ends at 5. I think your market is a lot smaller than you think. The kind of people who ask friends to book time on their calendar are considered freaks anywhere outside of tech hubs
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.
I put a generic “out of office” block on my calendar if I have personal business and it’s rare enough that I don’t get why it needs a solution. Maybe other people are scheduling things during work hours a lot more often than me?
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.
This is a nice idea, but assumes both your employer and your personal account use Google Calendar. If that assumption goes away I might be interested in this.
What guarantees does this make about access to data and how does it make them?
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.
Firstly, I want to offer my sincere apologies for how we mishandled this. You are absolutely right: we should have done a better job communicating how this change was rolling out.
For background (and for anyone else reading): what is being referenced here is that Reclaim is, by definition, a product that can straddle two or more Google or Microsoft accounts. It can do things like block out your work calendar when your personal calendar gets busy.
The issue is: some companies have come to us and told us they will no longer approve of Reclaim's access to their calendars unless we enforce certain restrictions, such as only allowing authentication to an account that contains their calendar data (ex: Reclaim!) via their SSO provider, and no other authentication is allowed.
It isn't quite accurate that they have "taken over" your account. In fact: if you disconnect their corporate Google/Microsoft account from your Reclaim account, you are free to use it how you want. For example, their regular calendar sharing allows you to connect to your work account via your personal Google calendar, you could do that and not avoid any disruption in service. But most companies don't permit more than "free/busy" level of sharing, which isn't quite enough for this workaround.
If you need help disconnecting your company's account from your Reclaim account, we can walk you through how to do that.
We are exploring more sophisticated (but much more expensive) solutions, such as allowing you to authenticate with your non-company credential but not show you any information that is associated with your company calendar (ex: data masked). But it's unclear if your employer (and similar) would accept this. It's also still a degraded experience for the end-user, so it's tough to say if this is ultimately better or worse than the current situation.
That all said: I am sorry we didn't roll out this change to you. I hope you will give us the benefit of the doubt and consider working with us on ways to meet your employer's requirements as well as yours. You are welcome to email me directly at patrick@reclaim.ai if you'd like to discuss this further.
Author of peek here. Honestly, I got burnt out. We stopped using this internally at GitHub for our secondary Rails applications which made it difficult to continue working on. Rails was going through its identity crisis with asset pipelines and I didn't feel like trying to support every available option for people like Sprockets, Importmaps, NPM, Bower, etc. It was nice when there was the paved path and users could generally follow the README and be up and running quickly.
Hey there, sorry if this came across as critique on the project itself or you personally. I get it, priorities change and projects get abandoned by the original maintainers.
My comment was more aiming at the ecosystem at large. Lots of the (RoR) stack in my current day job depends on long abandoned libraries with unmerged fix PRs from years ago and I see this all the time in the Rails ecosystem. Interest in the ecosystem is shrinking and this is one symptom.
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.
I’ll be dead. I wouldn’t give af if it was written on toilet paper.
Obituaries are more for the living to help with the grieving process. When my grandparents passed, I think my parents and extended family wrote something and submitted that to the local newspaper.
When were obits ever free? The family typically paid to run an obit in the paper. I can't imagine why it would be any different. After that, people had to pay $0.25 to $2.00 for the paper to see them.
Libraries typically keep archives of newspapers accessible for free. I imagine the long record of obituaries in this archive would be invaluable for certain types of research.
I’m somewhat surprised a WikiObituary doesn’t exist yet, with them collectively written and crowdsourced prior to death and licensed permissively. Wikipedia + ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting perhaps for the rough cut, and then clean it up.
Might try to find some time to spike a GPT or something and see what happens.
C# is used for Actions: https://github.com/actions/runner, and Go is used a lot for internal services. There is no traction rewriting our monolith in C#.
It's feature complete, and a few thousand people are already using it. It's probably the better choice for most users. But there are still a few issues with the file editor that I want to fix before I officially release it, because I have a lot of corporate users who presumably prefer to have fewer features but more stability.
I'm using it for probably 1.5 years and never had any problems with it. I can highly recommend it. It's really stable and I reported 2 (small, cosmetic) bugs which both got fixed within a few days.
There are annoying show-stopper bugs that the developer refuses to fix, like this one for not being able to set options for null/empty values when importing data from csv ( https://github.com/jakob/Postico/issues/406). Or issues importing CSVs exported by Postico itself, that seems like a pretty basic requirement.
On the other hand, even though DBeaver has an annoying and ugly UX (as any other 90s Java software) and is full of warts (eg not showing a unique key constraint in a postgres table, which was visible in Postico), it somehow feels more substantial.
It's not an empty string bug report. It's not being able to import CSVs with blank values, because postico interprets them as null, and no way to remap the values. Depending on your workflow, this could be a serious hinderance.
Previously used Reclaim but found $10 a month to keep 2 calendars in sync was excessive and the software was increasingly becoming more team oriented, no longer for individuals. Felt like I was paying for a product and also the product. I just needed to keep 2 calendars in sync, not smart meetings, analytics, integrations, etc. ideally I set it up and forget about it.
I really needed a way to sync my calendars privately, without all the extras. Now that Dropbox has purchased Reclaim, it's even more important I feel like my calendars are not spied on. I knew I could provide a similar service.
Here’s what makes me excited about it as a user:
Affordable: Just $20/year with a 7-day free trial. Cancel at any time for a pro-rated refund.
Privacy First: No need to store events on a servers enabling unlimited calendar syncs.
Working Hours: Adaptive feature that adjusts if an event falls outside your specified working hours.
Round Event Times: Opt to round event start and end times to the nearest 15 or 30 minutes for cleaner scheduling.
Invitations: Block time between calendars when you receive a meeting invitation that you haven't responded to yet. Decline it? The time block on your other calendar is removed.
My plan is to keep it small and focused, while also listening to user feedback for how you'd like to manage your personal and work calendars more efficiently.
Thanks for checking out my new project.