I looove experiments. My childhood was full of hardware experiments and then I switched to software.

For FEEDHAMMER–the product I’m going to release for Sisyphus Consulting Pvt. Ltd., one of the key questions was this:

What is Google Calendar’s frequency of checking for new changes?

Now, as usual, I “researched” on the internet but there was no authoritative answer to this. And that makes sense because there are some obvious technical reasons.

So, what should I do?

Work on the product accepting the ballpark answers? I would have but I like setting up experiments.

So, the solution was simple: Write some code and record how often Google Calendar pings Feedhammer.

The dashboard you see in the screenshot is a quick-build for internal testing. I can’t describe how helpful agentic coding becomes in such a scenario. But that’s not what this post is about.

Google Calendar Ping Dashboard

The pleasure of interacting with the real world, setting up experiments, learning from them…that’s beyond words.

For curious souls: What’s going on in the dashboard:

Google Calendar is checking 3 test feeds I have created on Feedhammer. And we can see that after the first check, GC has checked again roughly after 1 hour and 7 hours.

The experiment is still on, let’s see how it goes.