I've been coding since I was a little kid and my first encounters with Shortcuts were intimidating. The thing that pushed me to learn it was perennial laziness

I've been coding since I was a little kid and my first encounters with Shortcuts were intimidating. The thing that pushed me to learn it was perennial laziness. Anything that I see myself doing repeatedly becomes a target for automation. To specifically learn Shortcuts, I started by just throwing blocks in and seeing what they did. Another way may be to get other people's Shortcuts and then start rearranging and messing with what they created. It depends on how you learn. For your specific case, my approach would be to make sure my iOS calendar and Google calendar were linked. You can then use the Calendar->Create Event block, trusting that your iOS calendar will sync itself with Google. The other step, which might intrigue you due to additional technicality, is utilizing the Web->GetContents of URL block to make requests to remote APIs. You could conceivably make requests to the Google Calendar API with that block, and have it trigger on device-specific events.