This is going to be long, so hunker down for a good read.
Problem: Our Cub Scout den leader sends email reminders to all the parent about upcoming events. I decided to setup a gCal (google calendar) will all the events so that other parents could just check the calendar as they wish, or subscribe to the ical file to integrate with their own calendar. But several of the parents don’t have calendars (shame, shame) and everyone still liked the idea of receiving email reminders. So I decided to write a ruby script to email reminders automatically two days before the event.
Solution: Ruby is a great language to handle this. Especially since there are gems to handle many of the functions we need. Some of the gems we will be using are as follows: