The author wants to write a Telegraf plugin to interact directly with the Particle Cloud's Webhooks architecture, which allows devices to send data to InfluxDB. The author starts by familiarizing themselves with existing Webhooks plugins and then modifies an existing Rollbar plugin to create their own Particle.io Webhooks Telegraf Plugin. They define a `ParticleData` struct to map the incoming JSON data from Particle to the desired format for InfluxDB, and implement event handling logic in the `particle_webhooks.go` file. The author also adjusts the Particle JSON output to publish temperature data and defines a webhook with the correct URL and settings to send the data to their Telegraf instance. With some help, the plugin was completed in about a day, and the author plans to expand it to parse other fields in the JSON data and put them into the database based on other fields.