Now boarding · live at tonight.quest
Tonight
"I wonder what's going on tonight?"
That question started all of this. There were plenty of things happening at venues around me every night — live music, trivia, open mics — but finding them meant checking a dozen separate venue calendars, half of them buried in PDFs or Facebook events. So I made the thing I wanted to exist: one page that just tells you what's on tonight.
The scrappy years
The first version was on Cape Cod, and it wasn't really an app — it was me, a spreadsheet, and a nightly ritual of copying events off venue calendars by hand. It didn't matter. Within a few months, thousands of people were using it. Turns out nobody cares how the sausage gets made if it answers the question.
Marketing was similarly homemade. I became the (To)Night Owl — showing up at events in branded gear, frozen water bottles stuffed in the costume to survive the heat. I made custom glo-bands, glowing wristbands people could wear out, and built a charging rig that brought them to full brightness in five seconds.
The rebuilt version went into testing in January 2020, with a launch planned for April 2020. You know what happened next. Perfect timing.
Tonight, today
It's back, and it's real software now. tonight.quest covers venues in the Boston area, with a scraper that pulls each venue's calendar automatically — no more nightly spreadsheet ritual — and a map that treats transit as a first-class way to get there, because a night out shouldn't require a parking spot.
Code lives at github.com/jpaul156/tonight.