Schedule Maker

The story

A scheduling tool shaped by the operation it had to run.

I built Schedule Maker to coordinate a real summer program with more than 30 staff members, more than 15 rooms, field trips, Gymnastics, Aftercare, breaks, and responsibilities that changed throughout the day. The schedule began on a whiteboard, where one small change could ripple across several people and rooms. Missing one of those dependencies could leave a room uncovered, skip someone’s break, or send the wrong person to a time-sensitive responsibility.

I first moved the work into Google Sheets because it seemed like the quickest way to make the process repeatable. Over time, that spreadsheet grew into roughly 40,000 lines of custom Google Apps Script. It worked, but improvements became risky: changing one part could destabilize another or stop the system altogether. I rebuilt it as a web application so the rules, data, and interface could be separated, tested, and extended safely. Each feature came from a problem that had actually appeared during the program.

To use it, an administrator defines people, weekly work hours, default assignments, rooms, Homerooms, Gymnastics groups, and Special Instructions. On a given weekday, the scheduler can mark someone absent, add an exception range, move an activity, swap people, or ask the Randomizer for a reviewed set of proposals. The coverage engine checks the resulting schedule, reports explain conflicts and shortages, publication history makes changes recoverable, and Print Center turns the selected weekday into a configurable packet for the team.

The system replaced hours of manual setup and cross-checking with a workflow that can prepare and verify a day in about 10 minutes. More importantly, it made the hard parts visible: coverage dependencies, break requirements, exceptions, linked duties, and downstream print changes are handled in one place instead of remembered by one person. The portfolio demo uses the published fictional Supabase baseline, then gives every visitor a private browser copy to explore without changing the shared source or anyone else’s work.