Creating a Google Calendar Discord Bot

For the last several months, friends of mine have been asking for a Google Calendar Discord bot.

You see, we have a weekly game night which likes to get canceled often (or for months at a time when things get crazy). Then, when we have a night scheduled, some of us tend to forget until the last minute. As the event got closer, we needed to auto-post event reminders to our Discord channel.

After much searching, we never found anything quite like what we wanted, so I decided to make it myself. I’ve never built a Discord bot before, but honestly, that makes it a fun project for me.

It took about three weeks, but I got a basic bot up and running, connecting to the Google Calendar API, pushing event reminders out to Discord channels, and a simple web interface to control everything.

The best part was Google Calendar pushes updates to the bot in real-time, making the entire thing seamless.

Then came the point in a project when I want to get some feedback before going further. So I did something I never do and posted it to Reddit to see how bad a response I would get. I threw together an animated GIF demo, closed my eyes, and hit post.

The result? Amazingly (for me at least), the post did well with very positive comments, much better than I could have ever hoped. I’m not sure how much further I would have taken Chronicle Bot without this, but now I want to see how far I can take it.