Add six draft posts drawn from Calendula issues

Technical, journey, and philosophy posts sourced from the Calendula issue
threads, reviewed for source-accuracy, standards, ethics, and voice. All
draft:true with staggered future pubDates; they stay hidden in prod until
approved (draft:false) and due.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

src/content/blog/when-it-stopped-being-mine.md

@@ -0,0 +1,88 @@
+---
+title: The week my calendar app stopped being just mine
+description: >-
+  Calendula was a thing I built for myself. Then strangers started relying on it,
+  filing issues, debating design in the comments — and it turned into something
+  with a small community around it.
+pubDate: 2026-07-03
+tags: [open-source, calendula]
+draft: true
+---
+
+I built Calendula for myself. I wanted a fast, good-looking, privacy-respecting
+calendar that didn't own my data, couldn't find one, and so I made one. For a
+while that was all it was: my app, my phone, my taste.
+
+Then people showed up. Not many, not all at once — but enough, in about two
+weeks, that the project stopped feeling like a thing I *have* and started
+feeling like a thing I'm *responsible for*. This is a note about that shift,
+because nobody tells you how quickly it happens.
+
+## From requests to a rhythm
+
+The first issues were classic solo-dev fare: someone asked for a setting to
+choose which view the app opens on. I shipped it in
+[v2.9.0](https://codeberg.org/jlmakiola/calendula/issues/1) within hours, and
+"that was quick!" came back. Then a tappable month grid; then a Saturday
+week-start — each one small, each one turned around fast. Then: limit the agenda
+view to today, or this week, or the next 30 days — and here the exchange got
+interesting, because I stopped just building the literal request and started
+asking *what options would you actually want*, and we designed it together in the
+thread.
+
+That rhythm — report, discuss, ship, "thank you" — is the engine of a small open
+project. It's also a trap if you let it: not every request should be built. The
+hard skill isn't saying yes fast, it's
+[saying no well](/blog/the-feature-i-said-no-to), and keeping the app inside its
+[lane](/blog/open-standards) while the person still leaves happy.
+
+## The moment it gets real
+
+There's a specific sentence that changes how you feel about a side project. Mine
+arrived on an issue about registering an intent filter, from someone who'd hit a
+papercut on GrapheneOS:
+
+> I have been looking out for a well-designed and fast calendar since switching
+> to Android four years ago and your software seems to be on point.
+
+Four years of waiting. That's the kind of line that reframes a side project —
+someone who's been holding out for exactly this and is ready to depend on it. The
+same thread is where
+I admitted a limitation honestly (there's no Android API to set yourself as the
+default calendar, so no in-app button is possible — only the system picker), and
+that honesty landed better than a workaround would have. Relied-upon software is
+built on trust, and trust is mostly just not overpromising.
+
+## When users become co-designers
+
+The real tell that a community is forming isn't traffic — it's when people start
+doing the *thinking* with you, not just the reporting.
+
+On a request to make the view quick-switch button configurable, the conversation
+turned into an actual design debate: should reordering live in a settings tab, or
+should you long-press and drag items in place? Would drag-in-place cause
+accidental reordering? We went back and forth on the interaction, not the
+feature. On the contact-birthdays feature, a user who *wasn't even the original
+reporter* created test contacts — one Google, one CardDAV — to help me isolate
+why some birthdays showed up and others didn't. That's not filing a bug. That's
+debugging *with* me.
+
+I don't have a big community. I have a handful of people who care about a good
+calendar as much as I do, and who've started treating its rough edges as *our*
+problem. That's the shift.
+
+## The unglamorous parts, on purpose
+
+None of this is a highlight reel. In the same fortnight I shipped a release that
+mangled the month widget's switching buttons — a regression a user caught and I
+had to go dig out of a recent change. The birthday feature still doesn't handle
+every account type. Writing this, I could have quietly left those out. But the
+point of doing this in the open, on a public tracker, is that the reasoning and
+the mistakes are all readable — the terse "closed" label replaced by an actual
+conversation anyone can follow later.
+
+A project stops being *just yours* the moment someone else would notice if it
+broke. Calendula crossed that line quietly, in a week of issue threads, and it
+changed how I write every commit since. The question stopped being "does this
+please me" and became "would I want to explain this decision to the people in the
+comments." The second one is the one worth answering.