Year in Poetry
Tell AI your meaningful dates → a year calendar you can read like a poem.
What it looks like when it’s working
What you’ll build
The participant tells AI the meaningful dates in their life — birthdays, anniversaries, the day they got their dog. AI generates a beautifully designed, scrollable year calendar with a short AI-written warm note for each date ('Grandma's birthday — call her' / 'One year since you and Sam').
“My whole year, laid out like a poem.”
While you build
- Decide who's looking at this — a quiet you-only calendar looks completely different from one printed for the family fridge. The audience drives every visual choice.
- Hardcode your dates into the build. Don't construct a date editor today; that's the polished version.
- Keep the AI's tone consistent across notes. 'Grandma's birthday — call her' should match the energy of every other line.
- Static display. No login, no database, no Google Calendar sync. The constraint is what makes it ship.
How the night flows
Every Coding Jam follows the same five-phase shape. Talking is short, building is long.
- 0:00 – 0:15Intro
Grab a name tag and a slice, say hello to the instructor, and meet the people either side of you — you'll be asking them things later, so it pays to know their names now. Low pressure, high creativity, ship something messy. Then a quick word on what the room is building tonight, and you're off.
- 0:15 – 0:30Credits & setup
The instructor shares the Google Cloud credits with the room. Everyone gets their environment ready — whichever tool they brought. Nobody should be installing anything once the build starts.
- 0:30 – 1:35Build
Heads down, and enjoy it — this is the part everyone came for. The agent does the typing; you decide what it's making. Ask the room when you get stuck; someone two seats away hit the same wall ten minutes ago. Want more structure? The codelab walks the spec-driven route — Setup → Plan → Review → Build → API → Verify — but nobody has to follow it.
- 1:35 – 2:00Share & submit
Show the room what you made — two minutes, screen-shared from your seat. Half-finished is welcome; the wobbly ones are usually the most interesting. Say what surprised you along the way, and cheer for everyone else while you're at it. Then submit your build before you leave. This is the one thing not to skip — it's what puts your name and your chapter on the showcase, and it takes about two minutes.
Where to take it after the jam
The 45-minute build is the win in the room. These are the ideas you can pull in over the next week — your homework isn’t homework, it’s the polished version.
- Login + edit-your-own-dates flow
- Google Calendar sync
- Birthday reminder notifications
- Family-shared edition
- Monthly reflection poem
- Photo-per-date upload
- Audio bed (ambient soundscape)
Open one of these in the starter — safety nets, not requirements.
context/calendar-layout.mdcontext/personal-data.md