My main project during my 11 week summer at Google was to create a globally scalable version of the internal events calendar (or Ecal). Everyday, events open to Googlers happen on Google campuses worldwide, and they needed a way to view those events in one place, categorized in an intuitive way. I designed and developed a full featured web application that took care of this need.

A Job That Needed Doing

Version one of the events calendar was a single HTML file and a hacked together JavaScript file that had calendar ids (identifiers for Google calendars) hard coded in. Not only did this mean that the calendar was not scalable to multiple campuses, but also that maintaining it was extremely cumbersome at best. To fix this problem I created a full web application version of the Ecal that provided a new back end for easily managing calendar metadata and information specific to each Google office. The goal was to provide a sufficiently "Googley" experience, staying in line with the current Google look and feel. Making it easy and intuitive to use was extremely important, as the administrators in charge of events and the Ecal in different offices were likely to not be very technically minded.

Technologies Used

The application was built entirely from scratch using Python and the Django web application framework, running on Google App Engine (with a hefty sprinkling of JQuery).