Why I built Rubbish Day

Rubbish Day started as a way to stop guessing after public holidays and disruptions. It became a free NZ/AUS rubbish and recycling calendar because the useful answer was buried in too many different systems.

The problem was certainty

Most people know their normal bin day until something interrupts the rhythm. A public holiday lands in the middle of the week. Local infrastructure work changes a collection. A council notice is somewhere online, but not where you need it when you are trying to decide what goes out tonight.

I wanted a sure way to know. Not a calendar habit, not a guess based on last week, but a data-driven answer for the address in front of me.

The first version was not a public product. It was a personal itch inside Home Assistant. I found a HACS plugin that did something similar on a simpler level, and for a while that was enough. Then I started hitting bugs and disruptions, and waiting for patches became more annoying than building my own version.

The first rebuild

So I rebuilt it for myself. That is usually how my favourite projects start: some everyday interaction feels more awkward than it needs to be, I get curious about the system underneath it, and then I start pulling on the thread.

Home Assistant solved the personal workflow, but discovering n8n changed how I thought about the problem. Suddenly it was not just a reminder. It was a repeatable data process: fetch from a source, normalise the result, cache the useful bit, and present it in a way that ordinary people could trust.

Useful software often starts as a private workaround that refuses to stay private.

Why it became public

By 2026, enough friends and colleagues had asked about it that I rebuilt the stack as a live public web app. The intent was simple: make the tool free for anyone who finds it useful.

There is no commercial motive behind Rubbish Day. It sits in the same part of my brain as other community-minded tools: if I can make the answer clearer, and the cost of keeping it available is reasonable, then putting it online feels like the right thing to do.

The current coverage includes New Zealand and Australia, with the longer-term aim of adding as many countries and councils as the source data allows. That last part matters, because the source data is the real project.

The messy part is the councils

The biggest surprise has been how segmented council operations are. From the outside, rubbish collection looks like one category of public service. Underneath, every council can have its own provider, endpoint, calendar format, lookup method, PDF habit, cache behaviour, and failure mode.

There is no universal pattern to depend on. Each source needs a bespoke data-fetch solution, and some are far more cooperative than others. That kind of work is fiddly, but it is also exactly the work I enjoy: understanding the underlying technology behind an everyday interaction, then hiding the mess behind a calm interface.

The product is deliberately plain from the user’s side. Enter an address, get the next collections, understand what goes out. The complexity belongs in the integration layer, not in the person’s evening routine.

What it says about my work

Rubbish Day is not trying to be impressive in the usual portfolio sense. It is not a big glossy campaign. It is not a dashboard full of fake numbers. It is a small public tool built because the practical answer should be easier to reach.

That is a useful expression of how I like to work professionally. I studied Creative Technologies at AUT, which trained me to move between disciplines rather than sit neatly inside one. Web development, design, automation, data, 3D, photography: the point is not to collect tools for the sake of it, but to understand enough of each layer to make better decisions across the whole thing.

Dream Creative grew out of that same habit of experimentation. Before the web-app work became the main thread, I pushed myself through a daily 3D art challenge for over a year and a half. Posting one piece every day taught me how much progress comes from repetition, curiosity, and being willing to make imperfect work in public while the craft catches up.

The standard

The standard I keep coming back to is usefulness. Does the thing answer a real question? Does it respect the person using it? Does it make the underlying system feel clearer than it did before?

Rubbish Day is a small answer to those questions. It gives back to the community with a tool I happen to find useful myself, and it keeps reminding me that good software does not need to announce itself loudly. Sometimes it just needs to be there on the night before collection day, quietly telling you what to put out.

More from the studio The case for bespoke →