Overview
Union Shift Coverage helps a team find coverage for a shift without anyone having to call or text down a list. An employee signs in with their Google account, posts a shift they need covered, and the app works its way down the seniority list — sending a real-time, in-app notification to one person at a time — until someone accepts. There's no texting, email, or push notification service involved yet; everything happens inside the app itself, which most employees reach through their phone's browser.
How It Works
This is a server-rendered Django app rather than a separate API + React frontend — Django's own templating and ORM take the place of Express and Mongoose. Three pieces drive the whole system: every person is an Employee row with a seniority_rank, and a coverage request cascades to the next person down that list rather than blasting everyone at once; a small state machine in coverage_service.py (DRAFT → SEARCHING → COVERED/UNCOVERED, or CANCELLED at any point before it resolves) owns every transition and writes an immutable CoverageEvent row for each one, so any request's full history is auditable; and notifications are pushed live over a WebSocket via Django Channels — the moment a Notification row is created server-side, it's pushed straight to every open tab for that employee, no polling. A manager role (just an Employee with is_manager=True) unlocks a dashboard of every open request, the full roster, and any employee's request/response history. Auth is Google OAuth via django-allauth, gated so a login only succeeds if it matches a pre-provisioned employee email. The app ships with 182 tests across models, forms, views, the state machine, auth linking, admin, and the WebSocket consumer itself.
Why I Built It / How I Use It
I built this because calling or texting down a seniority list to find coverage is genuinely annoying — it's slow, it's manual, and it means someone's stuck staring at a roster typing out the same message to person after person until someone answers. This app takes that whole process off a person's plate: post the shift once, and the app handles working down the list itself. It also gave me a reason to go deeper into Django than my previous Django project did — moving past request/response CRUD into Django Channels and WebSockets for real, no-polling real-time delivery, plus a proper state machine and audit trail instead of just flipping status fields. The next step is adding actual push notifications, so a person finds out they've got a new request without needing the app open in a browser tab.