---
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: false
---

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.