Fun project: automatic seminar reminders

I recently had some fun setting up a bot that sends automatic reminders for our group seminars (if you’ve ever done it, you know that remembering to send seminar emails is a pain). Let me share it here in case it is useful to others:

github.com/dgerosa/astroseminars_bicocca

Some of the things I learned:

• My goal was to have a single entry point where people organizing seminars can add their speakers, and then everything else is handled automatically. I set this up using a shared group calendar.
• The script fetches data from the calendar and sends emails. It turns out that the easiest way to send emails is to set up a dedicated Gmail account; ours is called [email protected]. You also need to generate what Google calls an “app password,” which is different from the full Google account password.
• The code runs via a GitHub Action, with that password inserted a GitHub secret
• For running this automatically, it turns out scheduled (cron) GitHub Actions are not always reliable, so I use our computing system, redfive, to trigger the GitHub Action itself. If anyone has a better solution, please let me know!

The system has now been deployed for a few months, and it has been working very well. Every Friday, it sends a summary of the following week’s events, and on seminar days it sends a reminder early in the morning.