omakase

omakase is a calendar event scheduler. Users connect to the app using their google account, and grant access to omakase to query their calendar. The app then schedules a meeting for a desired length in the next available slot for the user.

Features

• Connect to Google account
• Retrieve all events in their calendars
• Create a group
• Add existing users to group
• Create a new event (for themselves/with their group members)
• Unit testing for logic and some integrated testing

Architecture Decisions

• MongoDB: NoSQL database
  • highly flexible allowing for extensions of existing document structures
  • easy to query with NodeJS backend
• NodeJS:
  • library that allows for integration with Google auth/calendar
  • lightweight to allow for easier scaling in the future
• React:
  • simple, allows for easier development

Endpoints

/user/register

• POST: register user with omakase, save user info provided by Google auth flow

/user/groups

• GET: retrieve all groups user is currently a member of

/calendar/list

• GET: list all of the users' calendars that are connected to their Google account

/calendar/meeting

• POST: create a new meeting for the user
• payload:

{
    title: string,
    description: string,
    lengthMinutes: int
}

/calendar/groupMeeting

• POST: create a new meeting for the user
• payload:

{
    id: group_id,
    meeting: {
        title: string,
        description: string,
        lengthMinutes: int
    }
}

/group/:id

• GET: retrieve information about a specific group

/group

• POST: create a new group for the user
• payload:

{
    name: string
    description: string
}

/group/newMember

• POST: add a new user to an existing group
• payload:

{
    id: string,
    email: string
}

Running Locally

Backend

1. Make a copy of backend/.env.template and rename it to backend/.env
2. Add the required secret values
3. Start the server with npm run start

Frontend

1. Make a copy of omakase/.env.template and rename it to omakase/.env
2. Add the required secret values
3. Run the app with yarn start

Proposed New Features

• Integrate with different calendars
• Allow users to reschedule events made through omakase
• Allow users to create a shared calendar and track it within the app
• Allow users to invite people who are not yet users to register and join a group

Development Improvements

• Better error handling and logging throughout app to allow for monitoring
• Implementing session store to keep track of users that are logged in
• Moving Google Auth flow to be handled by backend and not frontend for security
• Encrypting id_token and refresh_tokens
• Refactoring endpoints to provide more flexibility to the user
• Adding full integration test suite

Bottlenecks

• There is currently a two way relationship between User and Group: this causes double the writes when adding, updating, and removing a user/group
  • In the case one write operation fails, the data would be in a middle state where the User would reference a non-existent Group or vice versa
  • Can instead try to embed group object within user
• Calendar API is queried on every request
  • Store a list of calendars the user has (if they would like to add a new calendar, they can manually request to query and add that calendar to be considered)
• Caching of group data
  • Likely won't be changing often; can be cached and then if updated, retrieve updates and display

Scaling

• Implementing a load balancer to balance requests
  • Requests can be split up between group requests and calendar requests
  • Alternative requests can be split between
• Implementing Primary, Secondary database replication
  • Primary would handle writes; Secondary would handle read