Festival Navigator

Plan a festival with your friends. One link per crew, everyone's picks on one wall, live, and it still works in a field with one bar of signal.

Try it: fest.kevinhg.com

Live: v116, checked 2026-10-19.

The 2026 season is over (Portola in September, ACL in October). Still in the catalog, with crews already picking: EDC Orlando (Nov 6–8) and Seismic (Nov 13–15), both lineups waiting on set times, and Tomorrowland Winter (March 2027). This is a personal project built by Kevin HG for his friends, in the open.

Festivals loaded: 10. The list lives in data/festivals/index.json, and only there. Adding one: docs/add-a-festival.md.

How it works

• Your crew is a link. Every festival board mints an unguessable link for its group of friends. The link is the access: no accounts, no passwords, no email. Anyone holding it can read and write that board, and nobody can touch any other. Different friend groups get different links, like real life.
• Your own link brings it all back. "My link" on the front page is yours alone. Open it on a new phone and every crew you're in comes with it.
• Inviting is a QR or a text. "+ Invite someone" opens one sheet: the crew link as a QR in the app's own look (a friend points their camera at it), a card you can save, or the link to paste into a chat. A pasted link unfurls as that festival's own card.
• The festival's data decides the layout. While only the lineup is out you get a searchable artist list. Where a festival publishes a stage grid, that day is a timetable: stage columns on an honest clock, overlaps side by side. Everything else (the afters, the late nights, the street party) is a stack of cards under the room it happens in, in play order. Picks carry over when set times land, because they belong to the artist, not the slot.
• Board or List. The menu on the festival's name switches between the wall and a time list of rows, per phone and per festival. In the List, what's already over folds away behind an "Earlier" line.
• Tap to open, + and − to pick. On a phone, a tap opens the card's shelf: its facts, − and + in its bottom corners, and the crew's notes. Levels go picked ×1 → ×2 → ×3 → must; + climbs and − steps back. With a mouse, hover grows the card and a click cycles the levels. Everyone in the crew gets a color, and overlapping picks blend on the card, so you can see at a glance where the crew is heading.
• Our picks. Just above the bar at the bottom of the screen sits where most of the crew will be right now (or next). Drag it up for the day's whole route, stop by stop, with the moments the crew splits. "Share our picks" sends the day as a few plain lines and a link that opens on it.
• Notes go where you are standing: on the festival, on a date, on a section on a date (the street fair on Friday), or on an artist. Replies thread one level deep, and a note you pin stays on top for you.
• Import from a festival's own app. Screenshots of your schedule there become picks: Gemini reads only what is printed, your phone matches the names, nothing is saved until you add them, and the image is never kept.
• Cancelled acts stay on the wall, struck through, with your picks kept and the reason when you open the card.
• Offline first. Picks save on the phone instantly and sync when signal comes back. The server merges every write atomically, so two people picking at once never overwrite each other.
• Spotify, if you want it. Connect (a sign-in that keeps no secret in the browser) and artists you already listen to get a badge; picks can become a playlist on your own account. See Spotify below; the 2026 rules are tight.
• Export. A day of the wall as a picture, or all your picks as text.

Privacy, plainly

• No accounts. The crew link is the key to that crew's board, so share it like you'd share a group chat, never in public. Your "My link" is a key to every crew you're in.
• On the hosted app, crash reports and a short list of usage counts leave the phone through one file, js/errlog.js. Each carries your name in the crew, your phone type and what you tapped, which festival you had open, your public person id, a random id for the phone, and its screen size and app build, all from an allowlist of fields and words. Never note text, artist names or crew links; links and tokens are scrubbed out of error messages.
• The same file also counts visits with Vercel's cookie-free Web Analytics, on the hosted app only: the page's address with everything after ? or # cut off (so never a crew link), plus the rough location, browser and device type Vercel works out itself. No cookie, and no IP is kept with the count.
• One switch in Settings, "Send crash reports and usage to Kevin", turns it all off. A fork on its own domain reports nowhere until it sets its own key; run locally, it still reports upstream until that key is changed or emptied (docs/fork-setup.md).

Run it locally

Use Node 24, as CI does (package.json pins engines.node to 24.x). The test tools ask for 24.15.0 or newer on that line (jsdom's own engines); Node 22.22.2 or newer also runs everything, and there npm ci prints an EBADENGINE warning about the 24.x pin, which is expected. No build step: the CSS is hand-written and the JS ships as ES modules.

1. npm ci
2. npm test runs the unit suite on a pinned clock. It needs no database and no secrets: it runs the real merge SQL in-process (PGlite).
3. npx playwright install chromium webkit once, then npm run test:browser for the real-input contracts in Chromium and WebKit.

tests/README.md explains the pinned clock.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗