Show HN: Building a 'liturgical lightbulb', bringing the Calendar to life | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Building a 'liturgical lightbulb', bringing the Calendar to life

github.com

109 pointsangrygoat9 comments

I love everything about this. Shopping for hardware now. If I get it up and running, I'll submit a PR for the US Episcopal calendar.

This is a bigger and more involved project than I think a lot of people will realize. One of my recent side projects was a Mastodon bot that posts a daily verse from the Episcopal Hymnal 1982 (botsin.space/@hymnal1982), and getting it to reflect the liturgical calendar was a job and a half. (It missed all of Christmas after Christmas Day; have to go debug that.)

I was looking up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sylvester_I recently (no points for guesses as to why), and was surprised to learn, en passant, that catholics simplified in the 1960s and now only have 4 different classes of feast days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_of_saints#Ranking_of_... ; I imagine whatever came before was slowly accreted over the centuries and, however simple it started, had eventually relied on people having lots of time to learn all its subtle corner cases...

There have been a few rounds in the Church's history of gradual accumulation of feasts followed by a simplification.

A little while back I wrote some code to calculate a liturgical calendar based on pre-60s rubrics. [1] It was a fairly complicated project. There have been a few edge cases that have come up over the years. (E.g., if Christmas Eve is on a Sunday, does it take precedence over the 4th Sunday of Advent? If the Feast of St. John falls on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, which takes precedence?)

[1]: https://github.com/joe-antognini/tridentine_calendar

Awesome! Have a look at https://github.com/grahame/church-calendar which the current code uses; it should be fairly easy to add the Episcopalian calendar. One neat thing with my church-calendar library is extensive metadata, so you can find out more about the feasts (Wiki, but also the CoE and Episcopal books of lesser feasts.)

Clever! I love seeing super-niche projects that neatly solve one person’s problem.

I am not a Christian... but my wife's family are Episcopalians and would appreciate this. I bet I could convince her uncle to build one.

This is delightful!

TIL: video in README.md works if you simply paste a link into it.

I was surprised too – and if you use Github's inbuilt editor for `README.md` you can literally drop an mp4 file on the editor and it uploads it and pastes in the link. Quite fancy!

https://github.blog/2021-05-13-video-uploads-available-githu...

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