Advent Calendar 2026 - Let it Glow!
This year I treated myself to a really nice advent calendar; one from ThePiHut (one of my favourite stores).
Goodbye Google Calendar
Today is my last day in Zürich and soon I’ll leave Google Calendar to start working on a new project so I thought I’d write down few thoughts.
I’ve been working on Google Calendar iOS for around 3 and half year and has been one of the best work experience of my life. I joined the team in Jan 2014 to help them ship the first version but then ended up staying quite a bit longer.
The Calendar team has always been based in Zürich and they made an exception just for iOS because it’s hard to find iOS developers in Switzerland. London is a pretty great site for iOS given the continuous supply of people coming from startups and other companies based in the UK and so I was able to convince the leadership to expand to London at least temporarily.
In this 3.5 years I travelled to Zürich 28 times (that’s 56 flights) for a total of just under 130 days. Zürich is a nice little town, with a population of just over 400k people. The city is amazingly well organised and public transportation is nothing less than perfect. The climate is exactly what you’d expect: typical continental weather with cold winters (below 0°, with snow) and hot summers (over 25° with occasional peaks over 30°).
The airport is extremely efficient and everything is unbelievably well managed. I would usually get on an early flight from London and it would take me 10–15 minutes from the moment the plane opened the doors to the moment I was sitting on a train inbound to the city centre; then 12 minutes to get to HB (Hauptbahnhof, the main train station). And obviously trains are on time; they apologise for delays over 4 minutes!
Since joining the team I tried to learn few words in Schweizerdeutsch (Swiss German) or Standard German since I thought that would be useful to get around the city. In reality even the cleaning crew at the hauptbahnhof (train station) speaks English better than me. I would try with my broken German (mostly pre compiled sentences) and they would just stare at me for a second and reply in fluent English. Occasionally they would start the answer apologising for not speaking good English…
Everything is perfect but ultimately I failed to fall in love with this city; maybe because I’m still pretty much in love with London? Even after all the pain of Brexit? Who knows. I thought about moving there many many times but in the end I still really believe that London is the place where I want my kids to grow up. Zürich is definitely a very cosmopolite city but schools are in Swiss German and that would mean having to choose an (expensive) international school or forcing my kids to learn yet another language.
Working on Google Calendar for iOS has been a very exciting experience. In this team I’ve learned a lot and I’m very proud of what we’ve been able to achieve. I’ve built the entire team, set the culture, the goals and together, we shipped a product that is used daily by million of users.
Few things about the team: as any team at Google it is made of extremely talented individuals with very diverse backgrounds (in the iOS team alone we have 9 countries represented) but in this case I think we added something more: passion. We are all passionate about Calendaring and iOS and that made a huge difference in the quality of the end result.
The app is a great example of product excellence and we currently have an average of 4.5 stars in the AppStore (in most countries) and the vast majority of the reviews are extremely positive.
I love to read our user’s reviews and wanted to mention some:
Was very frustrated with the apple calendar app This is much better.
I use it all the time.
Use it for everything, super happy they added the monthly view.
I’d be lost without it.
Could not live without it
Great for keeping family organized!
Obviously the app is avalable in many languages and here are the best quotes I could find in some of these languages:
🇬🇧 Best calender EVERrrrrrr
🇯🇵 毎日使ってます
🇫🇷 Je l’utilise tous les jours
🇸🇦 التقويم جداً جميل ويستاهل الخمس نجوم
🇨🇭 Es gibt nichts besseres:)
🇹🇼 很方便、易用
🇰🇷 좋습니다
🇷🇺 Помогает не забывать ничего важного
🇳🇴 Helt perfekt
🇵🇱 Bardzo przydatna aplikacja
🇮🇹 Bella. Oltre che eccellente app.
If you believe Google Translate is doing a good job the gist of those reviews is pretty simple: The app is great and it’s used every day to keep track of important things in people’s lives.
Google Calendar AppStore Screenshots. Yes, the photo on the “Vintage clothes market” event is actually me.
Last year the Google Calendar app was nominated “The Best Calendar App” for both iPhone and Android by The Verge. To cite their review: “Google Calendar nails what matters”. This is not a small achievement and something I’m extremely proud of.
During this 3.5 years a lot has changed in my career: I’ve moved more and more out of the pure individual contributor role and into leadership. It hasn’t been easy but in the end I’ve learned to love this new role. As an individual contributor I would have never been able to achieve what I achieved with a team and I’ve also learned to take satisfaction in the success and growth of everybody on my team. It’s amazing to see people improve and help them develop into incredibly talented engineers. I’m very proud of the very high success rate in promotions in my team and in how some of them have developed from junior developers to senior engineers and technical leads.
I’ve also very much enjoyed working on a product that I also use every day. At work I have a very busy schedule (see snapshot below) and my team was using my account as a test case for the app 😁, I consider this an achievement.
Snapshot of my calendar on a typical week. Note: The big empty space on the right side is what we call “the weekend” 😄
I also use it heavily for my personal life and I would be completely lost without it. I’m sure the team will keep up the great work even without me and I can’t wait to see the new features that they are working on.
Now it’s time for a new challenge. My team and I already started working on a new project and we are really excited by this new opportunity. Right now everything is still under wrap but I hope to be able to disclose some info soon.
So long 🇨🇭 and thanks for all the 🧀 and 🍫.
Uf Widerluege.
First posted on Medium on June 29, 2017.
2026
2025
2025 Year in Books
This year I haven’t read as much as I wanted but I did manage to reach my target of 20 books. Next year I’ll set it higher (24 maybe?).
Hello, World!
As per tradition Hello, World! must be the first post on any new language or new web site so here it is.
2017
Goodbye Google Calendar
Today is my last day in Zürich and soon I’ll leave Google Calendar to start working on a new project so I thought I’d write down few thoughts.