Lightning Calendar

Engineering | Lead Front-End Development for Calendar UI

Salesforce’s transition from its classic UI (known as Aloha) to its new Lightning Experience was an opportunity for innovation and new feature development. At this time, a team spun up to build a calendar UI from scratch that could be used to schedule tasks, meetings, and other record-related date-based interactions.

We had a dedicated designer delivering the design direction, the development alone was a massive undertaking — think of all the corner cases of how overlapping events need to render across all the different views and timeframes. Fun (really).

As the lead front-end developer, I was responsible for building the entire calendar from the ground up. The was one of the most difficult front-end development projects I’ve ever worked on. The complexity of stacking, overlapping, and multi-day events across day, week, and month views — compounded by the intricate nature of working with dates and times across different locals — required a level of enginuity I didn’t know I had in me (not to mention a handful of patents — this was the first fully accessible calendar on the web).

We considered using one of the many calendar frameworks available on the web, but the internal security and licensing hurdles were too much to overcome and so we built it ourselves.

Later, after I left the team, someone added color coded calendars and events — nice.

The calendar could be switched between single day, week, and month views.

Users could add new calendars and events from directly in the calendar UI.

Prototype code that I wrote as I was developing the most ideal markup and CSS to render the calendar.

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