Calendar Invites Without OAuth: Five Lessons From a Coffee-Pairing Bot

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A Slack bot that pairs people for coffee sends meeting invites through a Google calendar template URL and a downloadable .ics file, avoiding per-user OAuth consent and stored refresh tokens. The team chose this because calendar access would require a second identity system, consent for two providers, and a larger privacy burden. Testing showed Google ignores a missing time and pre-fills an arbitrary slot, so the bot always sends an explicit UTC start and end time. Converting a local 2pm into the correct UTC moment required resolving the time zone offset twice to handle daylight-saving changes, which exposed a rare bug in three New Zealand and Antarctic zones. The team also noted edge cases such as unknown zone names and midnight rendered as hour 24.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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