Why not do something magical with your coding skills?

Last week, I built a Zydeco and Cajun events calendar for someone who’s been keeping the Bay Area dance scene alive for years.

Total time I invested: less than 3 hours over a 3 day period.

They were spending a decent amount of money on hosting, the site looked dated, and finally it had just stopped updating at all. This headache isn’t what you wish upon someone who already spends hours every month collecting and organizing event data from scattered Facebook pages and email lists.

Now we have: sfczcalendar.com - clean, fast, free to host. Built the whole thing with Claude Code, deployed on Netlify’s free tier, prototyped the header image with AI tools, then had a designer friend polish it.

Why build apps no one wants or toy projects to try out new tech and skills, when you can do something magical for someone you appreciate?

These projects are perfect for your portfolio too. Real users, real impact, real problems solved. I loved seeing this on resumes - it showed me that the candidate kept an eye out for problems that they could solve. You knew this was someone who’d contribute to “the commons” and liked solving problems.

Listening to incredible live music feels magical. So does helping people. Now especially with frameworks and LLMs, engineers have incredibly high leverage when they invest time in something.

Go forth with thy wizarding ways.