Meet Cal.com
Cal.com appeared as the answer to a simple question: is there an open-source calendar, scheduling, and appointment tool? There wasn’t. Peer Richelsen and Bailey Pumfleet co-founded the company, now sharing the title of Co-founder and Co-CEO.
In Peer’s own words, Cal.com is out to provide an open scheduling infrastructure for everyone. That includes anyone ranging from busy professionals setting up meetings across timezones to yoga trainers scheduling classes and to big governments issuing ID cards for its citizens.
Serving the scheduling needs of the world is a challenge both diverse and exciting—as any engineer who’s worked with calendars and time zones can attest. And, of course, maintaining that vision creates a significant demand for continuous engineering innovation and maintenance.
From open source to ongoing contributions
One standout moment for the cofounder was how we met.
Open source is great for our developers to build up their credentials, so we launched a scheme to sponsor them to work on popular open-source projects. Cal.com was of course part of the repos shortlist as it’s one of the fastest-growing open-source products.
“GitStart started contributing and publishing PRs on their own, without asking. I love open source, and this was a great way to get on our radar!” — Peer
After a few months, we became familiar faces in PR reviews, and they eventually became clients. The team was enthusiastic about the idea of considering us as reliable members who could consistently contribute to their goals rather than only relying on sporadic input.
Once he got the hang of GitStart, Peer loved our innovative approach that fits his workflow as an async leader. He said, “It’s really cool that GitStart internally figures out who the best person to address this is, plus having GitStart-wide reviews before publishing increased code quality. The time-to-PR is also fairly fast.”
After shipping over 100 PRs for Cal.com, GitStart’s contributions provided the team with significant time savings. The CEO admits, “Hard to put in hours how much time GitStart saved us, but a lot. And a lot of peace of mind. Our core engineering team can work on hard and important tasks.”
Thanks to GitStart, Cal.com engineers can focus on intricate challenges like dates and timezone logic or dealing with the complexity of old calendar protocols.
Beyond work: shared values in action
GitStart didn’t just streamline their development process; our presence also beautifully aligned with Cal.com’s internal culture, the team admiring GitStart’s mission of empowering talented engineers from all around the world.
The cofounder said: “We have a global team with very diverse backgrounds. We love taking bets on discovered talents and being able to work with talented engineers from GitStart from underserved regions.”
Partnering with GitStart has been a game-changer for Cal.com. It not only boosted their engineering capacity, allowing their core team to focus on critical tasks but also gave them access to a global talent pool that fits in with their company values.
