Alright, let me walk you through this little thing I put together way back, basically a simple calendar for 2011. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, just a personal exercise, really.
Getting Started
I remember wanting a straightforward, no-fuss calendar display, maybe something I could quickly check from my terminal. Store-bought calendars were fine, but sometimes you just want to make something yourself, you know? So, I decided to try and generate one myself. First thing, I had to figure out the basics. What day did 2011 even start on? A quick check told me January 1st, 2011 was a Saturday. Okay, that was the starting point.
The Actual Doing
I decided to use simple tools I had handy. Didn’t want to overcomplicate it. The plan was pretty simple:
- Figure out the number of days in each month. February is always the tricky one, but 2011 wasn’t a leap year, so it was 28 days. Easy enough.
- Lay it out month by month. I thought about how standard calendars look.
- Get the formatting right. This was actually the fiddly part. Making sure the dates lined up under the weekdays (Sun, Mon, Tue…).
So, I started scripting it out. I used loops, one for each month. Inside the loop, I had to keep track of the current day of the week. When printing the dates, I used some basic commands to handle the spacing. If a number was single-digit, like ‘7’, it needed an extra space compared to ’17’ to keep things aligned. That took a bit of trial and error. I remember printing intermediate versions, seeing columns all messed up, and going back to tweak the spacing logic.
Getting the days right under the headers (S M T W T F S) was key. I first printed the header for the month. Then, I had to print some blank spaces for the days before the 1st of the month. If the month started on a Saturday, like January 2011 did, I needed blanks for Sunday through Friday. Then I started printing the numbers: 1, 2, 3… When I hit the end of a week (after Saturday), I’d start a new line. I repeated this for all twelve months.
Finishing Up
After fiddling with the loops and the print formatting for a while, I finally got something that looked like a proper calendar. It wasn’t fancy, just plain text, but it showed all the months of 2011, correctly laid out. I ran the script, and bam! There was my 2011 calendar, right on the screen. It felt pretty good, taking that idea and just making it happen with some basic steps. Didn’t use it forever, but it was a fun little project and served its purpose for a bit. Just a simple thing I built.
