Onsite Day Calculator

Find the best onsite day to maximize your team's synergy.

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Inspiration

2020 has changed work towards remote. However, studies show that for many people working remote 100% is not preferrable. People name collaboration, communication problems, and general loneliness as reasons to return to the office. Looking forward we expect that more teams will follow a mixed approach, with the majority of team members coming onsite for 2-3 days. It becomes essential to coordinate in order to get the most out of it - ideally, people who work on the same projects should come in on the same day to get the most benefit. However, deciding this for many people over channels like chat is cumbersome and inefficient.

What it does

Onsite day calculator is a voting platform that takes individual preferences and returns the best possible onsite day. Under the hood it computes two scores for each day, Average Preference Score and Synergy Scores using our crafted formula. The two scores are used to produce a single number for each day which shows how good will it fit the team as the onsite day this week (day when everyone joins).

How I built it

It started with Ilya and Alex planning to work together from Aachen, Germany. We are both backend engineers with broad experience but don't have much experience in the front-end. We teamed up with Leo from North Macedonia who is a full-stack wizard and created it with python and js.

Challenges we ran into

Remote work is never easy :) Detailing out a seemingly simple solution reveals a lot of hidden difficulty Designing for a simple UX needs many trade-offs

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were building for quality, making sound design decisions and covering the application with unit tests - this helped us avoid any overhead for debugging, and increased confidence in our app. We were able to ship fast and get to a working solution that was hosted.

What I learned

That even an idea that looks simple hides a lot of challenges before it's operational. We have changed the API and data model quite a lot after making the first prototype, as it helped us understand use cases a lot better.

What's next for Onsite Day Calculator

  • make the app more scalable and robust to be able to serve many concurrent users but remain free
  • integrate with Google Calendar and Office365 to enable a simple on-boarding of new teams
  • use machine learning and historical data to see when actual preference of users differ from what they specify in the system. this could be a paid feature
  • allow for scheduling for a longer period than just one week

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