2026-06-29
Link: https://alexwlchan.net/2026/bin-calendar/
HN Discussion: 1 points, 0 comments
Alex Chan writes consistently excellent posts about small, hand-crafted software solutions to everyday problems, and this one is a delightful exemplar: turning the council's bin collection schedule into a personalised calendar feed. It's the kind of project that sounds trivial until you actually try to do it — and then you discover a tangle of fortnightly cycles, bank holiday shifts, and inconsistent municipal data formats.
What makes this worth reading isn't the bin calendar itself. It's the genre: the small, personal, domain-specific tool. A technical audience often gets pulled toward scalable platforms and reusable abstractions, but there's a quiet craft in writing software that serves exactly one household, one street, one weirdly-specific need. These projects tend to teach surprisingly broad lessons:
Alex's blog has a long history of this style — small, well-documented projects with clear code samples and honest discussion of what didn't work. Past entries have covered things like building a personal photo archive, parsing iTunes libraries, and various Python tooling explorations. The writing tends to be unhurried and pedagogical without being preachy.
For technical readers, the value is twofold. First, it's a concrete walkthrough of integrating a real-world data source into a personal workflow — likely involving scraping, parsing, generating a valid ICS file, and serving it somewhere a calendar app can subscribe to. Second, it's a reminder that the most satisfying programming projects are often the ones with an audience of one. Not every script needs to become a SaaS.
The post probably also touches on the fragility of the approach: what happens when the council redesigns their site, or shifts the schedule for Christmas week? These are the kinds of considerations that scale up to much larger systems integration work.