Rethinking the Office Hours app

It’s Winter Semester at BYU, and I’m again the TA for Phil Windley’s Distributed System Design class (CS 462). This time, we roped Reed into being a TA as well. We really liked the idea of the Office Hours app from last year, but we have a few different requirements this year:

Those two things increased the complexity of the problem fourfold. We used the same basic model as before (texting via Twilio) but chose a more distributed design:

Here is how this works in terms of events:

Separating the TA rulesets allows me and Reed to have the application behave differently for each of us. I prefer texting (or XMPP if I ever figure out a good way to do it), but Reed would prefer email, since his AT&T iPhone gets bad reception in our lab. All I have to do is add another rule to respond to the on_call_request event and make it do whatever I want.

Here is what my version of the TA ruleset looks like: