July 16 - My First (actual) Application

Wow! Today was the first actual, honest-to-goodness application that had tangible results, and tangible goals, and resulted in a positive outcome!

Goal:

Import a Google calendar into the Thunderbird email/productivity app.

Issues:

-publicly supplied calendars in read-only-mode do not provide an iCal subscription link;

-public iCal calendars cannot be duplicated;

-a large amount of events;

Process:

-determine what possibilities exist (manual entry, picking and choosing information, etc.);

-discovery of Google Apps and the scripting language;

-learning a bit of syntax regarding the GS code and javascript (C# knowledge of the . and other operators was extremely similar);

-doing a quick search on Google to see if any solutions already existed;

-filtering the stackexchange results and other search results;

-reading others’ code entries and deciphering the variables, functions, loop statements and syntax, and formatting;

Decisions:

-proceed with r&d on Google Apps and built-in functionality;

-create preliminary test script with Logging and error reporting;

-test with small test batches;

-ensure no actual data is deleted or removed by accident;

-write and iterate on code until a positive outcome is achieved;

Run:

-Run the code and see what happens;

Revise:

-Touch ups and revisions with some tagging features (i.e., adding the date of script execution to the event description, to enable quick error discovery);

Future:

-look at running the script weekly or bi-weekly via a job or cron-like schedule and entering in a non-static future date based on the current date instead.

The results were effective and most importantly, performed the goal with minimal time expended on implementing the functionality!