Care Circle

Inspiration

Elder care for a family member usually ends up split across a WhatsApp thread and whoever remembers what happened last shift. Medication timing, prayer times, diet, who's allowed to help with what, all of it resets every time a new person takes over. I wanted one shared record instead of knowledge passed hand to hand, which could definitely lead to complications.

What it does

Care Circle gives an elder's care circle, family, a hired aide, a neighbor who helps out Fridays, and all of the above one singular shared page: a timeline of doses, meals, and visits logged as they happen, a medication schedule with reminders, a prayer-time countdown pulled from the elder's own area, and an invite code that brings new people into the circle in under a minute. Beyond the family, there's an opt-in volunteer marketplace: open visit requests matched by area, with a real claim-confirm-check-in-check-out lifecycle. A volunteer can't strand a family mid-commitment by dropping out partway through.

How I built it

Vite, React, and TypeScript on the frontend with Tailwind, a Hono API on the backend, and Postgres on Neon through Drizzle ORM. Auth runs on httpOnly session cookies with a password-reset flow over email via Resend. Deployed on Vercel, built and run entirely on Bun for efficiency reasons.

Challenges I ran into

The visit lifecycle was the hard part: making sure a volunteer genuinely can't strand a family by opting out mid-visit, enforced server-side, not just hidden in the UI. Testing caught three real bugs before they shipped: duplicate phone-number signup returning the wrong error, the daily visit-digest email firing an hour off on DST days, and a volunteer able to drop out while holding an active visit.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

A live, working deployment that I could hand someone a QR code for and watch them use, as well as a project that I can not only put on my portfolio as experience, but a meaningful website that could pave the way to having our communities support each other.

What I learned

I learned how to coordinate elements like prayer times, diet, and access preferences resetting every handoff in a dashboard, as well as learning how to use Drizzle ORM with Neon for my database tables.

What's next for Care Circle

A verification method for volunteers. Right now opting in is just a checkbox, which could lead to users exploiting the volunteering system.

Built With

• bun
• css
• drizzle
• hono
• javascript
• neon
• postgresql
• pwa
• react
• resend
• tailwind
• typescript
• vercel
• vite
• zod