I got a ping from one of our ex-colleagues yesterday asking whether we had gone home for the day. Thursdays are a work from office day, and what usually happens , whether or not the sun is out is that a bunch of us from work decide to go for a few pints.
I was sadly working from home yesterday because of reasons, so I missed out. Some people DID go to our regular place and that made me think about… you guessed it, yet another app that I can practice my event sourcing on! I thought about those single purpose websites but I wanted to make something a little bit more useful.
I’ve been building a lot of small apps lately, for the purpose of implementing event modeling and event sourcing, and I really like the pattern of not having to create accounts but still have something personalized and usable.
It also made me think of those exclusive clubs where if you know the password they would let you in (or is that only in the movies?). ‘Secure enough’ is the motto. So the idea is to have a site where people can put in a place and a magic word and they can check if their friends are there. It doesn’t have to be an actual location, it could be a codename for a place or whatever.
Once they make the first query, they’ll be asked if they want to check in and announce their presence. The next person that queries with the same place and magic word then gets to see that person ‘in the room’.
Because my AI assistant had built so many of the same pattern apps, it was pretty quick to get it set up.
The one new thing in this app is notifications. If you want to add these to your own app, the keywords to chase are: Web Push API, service worker, VAPID keys, and pushManager.subscribe. Your assistant can walk you through the rest better than I can.
The rough shape: the browser hands you a subscription object, you store it, and when something happens you send a signed message that wakes up a service worker on the user’s device. No accounts, no logins, just a subscription per browser per place.
In the UI it’s just a bell you toggle per room. Subscribe, unsubscribe, done. So now when someone checks in, people can get a ping!
Oh yes, and I also got to test drive my agent’s new “/lets-build-it” skill to monitor implementation progress and I’m happy to report that it went quite well!
I called it RDP, short for “R du pa” — swenglish for “Är du på?” (“are you there?”). Feel free to test it out and make sure you let me know your magic word, cause i hash the passphrase in the event store 😀
EDIT: Oh wow, just as i clicked publish, claude.ai/design launched and I sent it my event model and it came up with some seriously good UI options!
being in tech 