Building a Shared Calendar [Part 1]: The setup

It has been a long time since my last post here but enough Turkey has been eaten and I am ready to write again. So next up is a series about building a shared calendar using Google's Calendar API.

The motivation? Well, my wife was looking for a job recently and was looking for a place to see all the 'networking' events for the legal profession in the area. None existed so she came one night and asked: "Is it possible to have a Google Calendar where anybody can add events?"

Google Calendar is great, you can easily share it and embedded, but only invited users can create events. So the idea was to create a website with a form for anybody to submit an event and behind the scenes use the Google Calendar API to create the event on the shared calendar.

The idea was never put in production, but here is the working site: http://seattlelegalcalendar.azurewebsites.net.

This blog series will go over the details of building this. Some of the libraries used:

• Express.js
• Google Calendar API
• vash
• blazeCSS
• Passport
• refresh-token