authenticate-ics

Turns the Authenticate conference agenda page into an .ics file you can import into Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar.

Generated calendars live in calendars/<year>/.

Requirements

uv. The script declares its own dependencies (beautifulsoup4, requests), so uv run installs them the first time.

Usage

# Full agenda for the default year -> calendars/2026/authenticate-2026.ics
uv run authenticate_ics.py

# A future year (assumes the URL pattern authenticate-u-s-<year> stays the same)
uv run authenticate_ics.py --year 2027

# If the URL or venue changes
uv run authenticate_ics.py --year 2027 --url https://authenticatecon.com/event/<slug>/ \
  --venue "Some Hotel, City, ST"

# Preview in the terminal without writing a file
uv run authenticate_ics.py --list --no-breaks

# Personal subset
uv run authenticate_ics.py --no-breaks --search passkey -o calendars/2026/passkeys.ics
uv run authenticate_ics.py --day 2026-10-20 --track "Non-human"

Filters can be repeated and combined: --day, --track, --room, --search (title, abstract or speaker) and --no-breaks. --html saved.html parses a saved copy of the page instead of fetching it.

What each event contains

• Start/end in America/Los_Angeles, with an embedded VTIMEZONE
• LOCATION: room plus venue address
• DESCRIPTION: track, speakers (with company), full abstract, link to the agenda
• CATEGORIES: the track
• Meals and breaks are marked free (TRANSP:TRANSPARENT)
• Stable UIDs derived from the site's session IDs, so re-importing an updated file updates existing events rather than duplicating them

Each new year

1. Run uv run authenticate_ics.py --year <year> --list to check the page parses.
2. If it 404s, find the new agenda URL and pass --url.
3. If the venue moved, pass --venue (and update DEFAULT_VENUE/DEFAULT_YEAR in the script).
4. If the time zone isn't Pacific, update TZID/VTIMEZONE in the script.
5. If it reports "No sessions found", the page markup changed: the parser looks for div.agenda__day[data-date] and .agenda__mobile-list .item--session[data-session-id].
6. Commit the new calendars/<year>/ files.