I Built an API Because My Government’s Website Got the Date Wrong (and Just… Deleted It)

There’s a funny (and slightly sad) story behind why I built mabims.dev . It started with a date. More specifically, a Hijri date . Once Upon a Time, the Government Website Had the Date For a long time, Indonesia’s Ministry of Religious Affairs (Kemenag) website displayed the current Hijri date. It was convenient. You opened the website, looked at the corner of the page, and there it was: Today: 30 Sha'ban Simple enough. A lot of people, including me, got used to relying on it. Then one day, something weird happened. A post went viral. Someone noticed that the official calendar published by Kemenag said one date , while the date displayed on Kemenag’s own website said the next day . They were off by one day. People started asking: How can the official website and the official calendar disagree with each other? The post spread. People discussed it. And then… The Solution? Just Delete It. I didn't know what exactly happened behind the scenes. Maybe it was a bug. Maybe it was a calculation issue. Maybe the website was using a different data source. I don't know. But I do remember what happened eventually. The Hijri date disappeared from the website. Problem solved. Technically. If you can't display the wrong date, you can't display a wrong date. Elegant. 😂 At the time, I just thought it was funny. A few years later, I became a developer. And suddenly, the story made a lot more sense. Years Later, I Became a Junior Developer Once I started working as a developer, I learned how easy it is to add a Hijri date to a website. You don't need to calculate the lunar calendar yourself. You just install a library. Or call an API. There are plenty of them. The problem is that most of the libraries and APIs you'll find use Umm al-Qura by default. And that's perfectly reasonable. Umm al-Qura is the official calendar of Saudi Arabia. It's well documented, widely supported, and easy to integrate. For a developer who just wants: Gregorian date → Hijri date it works great. But there's a