QueryCal

Today I launched QueryCal on Hacker News and got to the front page! Overall it resulted in ~5,000 pageviews and a bunch of signups.

Here are three lessons I learned:

1. People like the idea!
2. My conversion funnel needs a lot of work. There's very little functionality available on the site without signing up. As a result I got far fewer signups than I could've done.

After finding my experimental implementation really useful for tracking my own personal metrics, I started work building out the MVP.
This mainly meant: making a nice landing page, adding user signup, and having a nice web UI (to replace the YAML config files I was using for myself)

I came up with the idea for QueryCal because last year I did a terrible job of actually taking time off work and needed a way to see just how overdue I was to take a day off.

Because so much is already automatically tracked in my calendar (e.g. the HR system adds calendar events for booked holiday), I just needed a way to query it to get the metrics I wanted.

Originally I prototyped a Go MySQL implementation to evaluate queries but it was a bit buggy and didn’t support all the SQL I wanted. Now I’m using a full SQLite database for each user so you can really do some gnarly queries (recursive CTEs, window functions, the works).