🧭 Compass is open-source!
26 months of work, including 461 files, 21,905 lines of code, and 171 tests, is now public at https://github.com/SwitchbackTech/compass!
Anyone can read the code, suggest features, fix bugs, or even copy it for profit.
I never finished building my dream calendar. But now that the code is public, perhaps someone will be able to build theirs.
What does this mean for you as a user?
Your data will stay on Compass Calendar’s private databases and will not be accessible by anyone else. I open-sourced the code that makes Compass Calendar work, but not any of its user data.
If you’d like to disconnect access to your Google Calendar, you can do so at any time through your Google Account [link]. This will cause all of your Compass data to be deleted, so be sure to back up any tasks you created in Compass beforehand. It won’t affect your Google Calendar data — that’ll stay the same.
Compass will stay running on app.compasscalendar.com. Depending on how much support I get from the open-source community, it might even get a lot better!
What's next for me
I'll be working at Costco as a software engineer until April 2024. My creative energy will be spent making high-quality YouTube videos for junior developers. I'll spend some time approving and testing changes to Compass, but it won't be my primary focus anymore. I don't know what I'll do after April, but I have a feeling I'll be building another startup 😏
Wrapping up
The last two years were full of hard work, quality conversations, lessons, and growth. Whether you joined this list recently or when I started in 2021, you've been part of that. Thank you 🫂
Tyler
Changelog
Short product summaries
Compass got a little better last month, especially the UX. It feels smoother. I could get into the weeds about the layouts, grids, pointers, and geometry that come together to make that work. Instead, I’ll just link the PR for the curious. It looks better. We made things subtler so that you can focus on what really matters: your schedule. The sidebar got narrower, icons smaller, and the colors cooler. Here’s how it looks: Week view Day view This might seem like an underwhelming update,...
Compass got a little better last month, especially for developers. Things are faster and lighter. First-time builds for devs are 74% faster. Artifacts are 66% smaller. We ship 36% fewer dependencies. This makes working with Compass a lot more enjoyable. Self-hosting is easier. It’s been possible to self-host Compass ever since we went open-source in 2023. However, actually pulling that off took a lot of time (like, hours). We wanted to make it easier to get up and running. So, we added an...
Compass got a little better last month. Email/password signup. You can use Compass without connecting your Google account. Great news for self-hosters and anyone resisting the singularity. Sync repair. If you later connect your GCal and that connection becomes stale, Compass will display a button that magically fixes it and issues 1 BTC. Reliability & DX. Websockets → SSE, tanstack-hotkeys, and technical docs. Head over to app.compasscalendar.com and try it out for yourself. ’Till next time,...