This year I’d like to meet more people irl. I’ve not done a particularly good job of building an irl network over the past few years, and I’d like to change that. To help with that, and just because it was a bit of fun to put together, I’ve added a 'Next event' widget to my dashboard that shows the next irl event I’m attending

I’ve got an events.json file where I can add details like event-name, location and date

[
    {
        "name": "bristol coffee festival",
        "date": "2026-09-12",
        "city": "bristol",
        "country": "england"
    }
]

And then a nextEvent.js script that finds the next upcoming event (I did have to chatGPT this because it’s way out of my league atm).

module.exports = () => {
  const events = require("./events.json");
  const now = new Date();
  now.setHours(0,0,0,0);

  return events
    .map(e => ({ ...e, dateObj: new Date(e.date) }))
    .filter(e => e.dateObj >= now)
    .sort((a, b) => a.dateObj - b.dateObj)[0] || null;
}

And then with a little bit of nunjucks it magically appears on the dashboard (yay!)