Process:

I began by creating a Particle app on the Web IDE. I wrote a function that gradually lights up to red for fifteen minutes and then gradually changes the color to white for the next fifteen minutes. 

A challenge was to figure out how to gradually increase the intensity of the light. Given a specified duration, I calculated how much time should be delayed in between each increase in pixel intensity and looped through the intensity until I hit the maximum intensity specified. This seemed to work well. 

To connect this function to IFTTT, I first used "Particle.function" to publish the function to the Particle Cloud. 

Finally, I integrated Google Calendar with Particle by creating an 'applet' on IFTTT.com.