Skip to content

goosetherumfoodle/schedulebot

Repository files navigation

Schedule Bot

An sms-bot for scheduling volunteers to take shifts at a brick-and-mortar store. It reads a google calandar to find gaps in shift coverage and then sends notifications. People can then claim a shift by putting themselves on the calandar manually, or by responding to the bot which will create a shift in the calandar for them.

The binaries will expect that the environment variables defined in env.example are present.

Building

nix-build

Running tests

nix-shell --run "cabal test"

Design

This service was designed to be calm technology. The community group it was made for had a pre-existing scheduling workflow that involved people signing themselves up for shifts on a google calandar. Some people involved either didn’t have smartphones or access to the calander so instead they’d text someone else in the group to sign them up. Schedule Bot fits neatly into that workflow without introducing a new interface that workflow.

That being said, I never thought of a way to integrate admin functionality to the bot just using sms that I was happy with. So I put off the decision and when they want to add a new person I’ve just been updating a contact list on the bot’s server. But I recently realized the best way to handle this (and make less work for myself) is to deploy a desktop app on the computer at the store, that any of the volunteers can log into and edit the list of contacts. So I’m currently planning on doing a desktop app using elm, tauri, and I’ll probably add a lightweight db to the bot to replace the yaml file.

https://github.com/goosetherumfoodle/scheduler-fp

About

an sms bot for staffing a store

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published

Languages