Hey PH 👋

One of my all-time favorite essays on selling your by-products was penned by @jasonfried:

“The software and web industry can learn a lot from the lumber industry, the oil business, and corn and soybean farmers. Lumber was originally cut for boards for building. Oil was originally drilled for fuel. Corn and soybeans were originally farmed for food. But today these industries have figured out how to use the waste to make even more products.”

When we took a look around our codebase, we realized we were sitting on some pretty useful sawdust!

This project came to life when we set out to build a time zone selector for SavvyCal that humans could actually use (a pretty important thing for a scheduling app!)

It turns out, deduplicating and sourcing reasonable names for the 595 worldwide time zones is a lot trickier than it might seem!

We’ve spent hundreds of hours aggregating, normalizing, and organizing all the ridiculous time zone nuances. For example: Nepal runs on GMT+5¾, Hawaii and Arizona ignore Daylight Savings Time, and UTC+12 and UTC–12 are the same time zone… with a different date.

Use the SavvyCal Time Zone API to fetch everything you need to incorporate time zone elements in your app, such as human-friendly names, abbreviations, UTC offsets, and exemplar cities. Query the API right from your JavaScript front-end (using a public API token), or from your backend — wherever you need to use the data!

Check out the documentation and let me know what you think.