BIDA Calendar iCal Feed

February 5th, 2025
bida, contra, tech
A while ago I played around with manually generating iCal feeds for events, encoding the BIDA's regular schedule (1st and 3rd Sundays back then, with a more complex pattern for family dances and open bands) as in a machine-readable format. This was a fun project, but it didn't work very well: it didn't have any way to handle cancellations, special events, or other one-off adjustments to the schedule.

Still, having events automatically show up on calendars is great, and after Jeff Keller asked I decided to put something together.

Here's the feed: bidadance.org/events.ics. You can add it in Google Calendar by going to "Other Calendars" > "+" > "From URL":

And then pasting in the calendar URL:

Here's the next afternoon contra I'm able to attend, showing up on my phone:

For the actual implementation a script reads in the machine-readable list of scheduled events (dances.js). This is a bit more awkward that it could be, since the list is essentially JSONP and not pure JSON, so it needs to do a little hacky parsing. Then it interprets the records and uses the icalendar package to build in iCal file. Dates, times, and libraries can all be a bit tricky when they're an area you don't work in much, and I found Claude to be pretty helpful here.

I also set up a cron job (script) that looks for changes each hour and if so checks them in.

Let me know if you see any problems with it!

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, bluesky, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Exercises in benchmarking and evals, part 7: DeepSWE, Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires

This is part of a series of exercises on benchmarking, evals, and experimental design (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)1. We're going to look at three questions, which are presented before the answers to give you time to think about the questions before seeing the a…

via Posts on July 23, 2026

Donation recommendations for effective altruists (July 2026)

My recommendation for donors who are American citizens or permanent residents is that they donate directly to high-value political candidates.

via Thing of Things July 22, 2026

Let's Taboo the V-Word

Read this post on Substack.

via Home July 12, 2026

more     (via openring)