What To Do In Salt Lake
Figuring out what to do on a Saturday in Salt Lake used to mean opening a bunch of tabs. The Urban Lounge calendar, the State Room, Red Butte Garden's concert series, whatever the farmers market is doing this week, and a couple of Instagram accounts that may or may not have posted about the thing I half-remembered. Every venue has its own calendar, and nobody puts them in one place.
So I built What To Do In Salt Lake. It's a free calendar of concerts, markets, comedy, sports, meetups, and everything else happening around the Salt Lake Valley.
What it does
The homepage shows the next two weeks, one day at a time. If you just want to know what's going on tonight, tomorrow, or this weekend, there's a shortcut for each. You can also search the full calendar and filter by date, category, or keyword, or browse by venue or organizer if you already know where you want to go.
If you make an account, you can favorite events and put them in lists, and you can share a list with friends so everyone's looking at the same plan. Every event also has an "add to calendar" link, so it ends up where you'll actually see it.
Where the events come from
This is the part that took the most work. There isn't one feed of Salt Lake events, so I wrote an importer for each source. Some venues have a clean API or a Ticketmaster listing. Others have a calendar page that I parse. Each importer runs on a schedule, and events that show up in more than one place (Ticketmaster and the venue's own site, usually) get deduplicated so you don't see the same show twice.
For the one-off stuff that no importer would catch, there's a "Suggest an Event" form. On the admin side, I can paste in a link to an event page and have an AI model pull out the title, time, venue, and description to prefill the form. I still check every event before it goes live, but it turns a five-minute copy-and-paste job into a quick review. Visitors can also report an event when something is wrong, like a changed time or a canceled show.
Venues and organizers can get editor access to manage their own pages and events, which means the people who know the details best can keep them up to date.
How it's built
It's a SvelteKit app with Svelte 5, backed by PostgreSQL through Drizzle ORM. Auth is handled by better-auth, forms are protected with Cloudflare Turnstile, and new submissions send me a Telegram notification so I can review them quickly. The design is intentionally quiet: I wanted it to feel like it was made by someone who lives here, not like another ticketing site with a buy button on every card.
Go find something to do
If you live in or around Salt Lake, give it a try at whattodoinsaltlake.com. And if you know about an event that isn't on there, suggest it. The calendar is only as good as what's in it, and I'd much rather hear about the thing I'm missing.
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