A Notifications App

12 Apr 2018

One pain point that I’ve been having at college has been organizing informal events with people outside of my immediate friends. I like to make coffee and host morning coffee drinking in my lofted room, but I don’t have a good way to inform people that it is happening. The standard way to organize events at school is through an email list, but nobody checks their email on a weekend morning.

Espresso

One of my first shots

So I decided to make a lightweight webapp that would send push notifications to people’s phones on coffee mornings. With a single button press, they can subscribe to the reminders. It then sends automatic notifications about new and upcoming events.

Notification Website

The current view of the notification feed

I built it to learn React, and how to track users and send push notifications using NodeJS. The biggest struggle was to get a custom service worker working nicely with create-react-app. Eventually I solved it with cra-append-sw.

The demo is currently hosted at verynice.party.

I am rewriting the app to have a more maintainable codebase, allow users to set notifications per-event, and to make it easier for anyone to spin up their own page (which requires significantly rewriting the admin page). This might spark a new era in informal events at Olin.