Build Log
Source the Calendar Before Drawing It
A polished calendar built on an incorrect holiday is still wrong. The project activated by establishing its source hierarchy before treating any date as product data.
Federal overview, jurisdiction authority
The initial 2026 and 2027 datasets used Fair Work Ombudsman information as the national reference and official state or territory pages as jurisdiction-level authority. Australia’s holiday calendar is not one uniform list: substitute days, regional observances, part-day holidays, and differently dated celebrations require local evidence.
Each record stores the jurisdiction, date, label, and scope needed by the calculator. Where future school calendars were not independently confirmed, later releases marked them provisional instead of borrowing certainty from another state. That preserves a visible boundary between confirmed public records and planning data that still needs a later check.
The data file is a maintained source
Holiday JSON is versioned with the release and consumed by both the runtime tool and content generators. A change can therefore be reviewed as a data diff, propagated across every dependent surface, and checked against rendered output.
The public Editorial Standards explain the source hierarchy and corrections route. State pages expose the dates in context, while the calculator exposes their computational consequences.
What became standard
Research precedes interface. Hard facts come from the strongest available source, uncertainty is labelled, and the data artifact carries enough structure to serve both calculation and publication. A corrections path remains open because an official calendar can change.
Trace the approach through the South Australia page, the King’s Birthday guide, and the corrections contact.