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zachdon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

An algorithm to optimise vacation days using public holidays and weekends. Especially relevant at this time of year.

I created it a year ago and received quite some comments on the Show HN post[1]. Last weekend I updated it to work for end of year planning and adding fixed days off, which seems to solve most of the feedback. It was done with Cursor in agent mode.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42118039

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Hi, thanks for your feedback. GPT was able to make your change for Monday vs Sunday week starting :)

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Hi, thanks for your feedback! The list of countries comes from a popular ISO-3166-1 npm package.

I can see there was already much discussion about this topic over on their repo https://github.com/michaelwittig/node-i18n-iso-countries/iss...

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Thanks! Adding customisable fixed holiday days could be a nice idea :)

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Thanks! I made options to change the year and leave balance, but not to change the first day of the year. Let me know if it still works if you enter the right number of days

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Thanks a lot, now there's a quick feature to toggle off certain holidays, I see most US don't get Veteran's day indeed. It should work now, per state as well

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Thanks so much! ChatGPT and I just added a quick feature to hide certain holidays from a particular year, stored in LocalStorage. Let me know if it works like you expect :)

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Thanks, the count could indeed be improved. I left it as counting all clusters > 2 days as valid extra time off, so all 3 day weekends made from national holidays would be included. But of course it's over optimistic :)

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Thanks for sharing! The option to toggle holidays on/off should be working. Being able to arbitrarily add a chosen day isn't there, you just need to +1 to your days off count and let the algorithm choose for you.

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Thanks for your feedback! Indeed the algorithm only gives one result, as it tries to fill all gaps from smallest to biggest in the best way possible to create clusters.

Making it super customisable would be tough, as then it becomes just a personal calendar. Maybe showing the rankings transparently (3 options tied, choose which one wins) could be nice.

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Ah shame, I totally depend on the well maintained npm package date-holidays. But I guess it could use a PR! https://github.com/commenthol/date-holidays/blob/master/data...

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Thanks! ChatGPT and I made the change for per-state support and to hide individual holidays each year :)

zachdon Show HN: Stretch My Time Off – An Algorithm to Optimize Your Vacation Days

Thanks for the feedback! ChatGPT and I made the change to hide individual holidays for a country per year, click "edit list" :)

zachdon Bootstrap 5 alpha

I agree. Edit: Removed exclamation point

zachdon Bootstrap 5 alpha

Would be awesome if the submission guidelines are linked on the submission page itself