One of the most popular posts I’ve written in recent months was the one where I talked about all the pointless personal projects I have. The consensus in the many comments I received was that anything you find useful isn’t pointless. And I can’t really argue with that.

But it’s nice when one of your projects is used by other people. And that happened to me recently.

The initial commit in mergecal is from 2016, but I strongly suspect it existed as code that wasn’t in source code control for several years before that. The idea behind it is simple enough. I wanted to be able to share my calendar with someone, but I didn’t have a single iCal file that I could share. For various complicated and yet dull reasons, my calendar is split across a number of separate iCal files. Initially, I remember thinking there must be an online service that will take a list of iCal calendars and produce a single, combined one. But a few hours on Google didn’t find anything so I did what any hacker would do and wrote my own.

It really wasn’t difficult. As usual, it was just a case of plumbing together a few CPAN modules. In this case, Text::vFile::asData did most of the heavy lifting – with JSON used to parse a configuration file. It can’t have taken more than an hour to write. And, as the commit history shows, very few subsequent changes were required. I just set it up with the correct configuration and a cronjob that rebuilt the combined calendar once a day and published it on my web site.

And then I forgot about it for years. The best kind of software.

Then, in January of this year, I got a pull request against the code. This astonished me. MY SOFTWARE HAD A USER. And in the PR, the user said “It boggles my mind that there is still no simpler free solution, even after all those years”.

So maybe this would be useful to a few more people. Perhaps I should market it better (where “better” means “at all”).

As a first step towards that, I’ve rewritten it and released it to CPAN as App::MergeCal. Maybe I should think about putting it online as some kind of web service.

Anyway, it makes me incredibly happy to know my software is used by even one person. Which reminds me – please take the time to say “thank you” to anyone whose software you find useful. It’s a small thing, but you’ll make someone very happy.