⌘ + Queue

A simple queueing service for CMU students.

See it live at https://cq.jez.io. (You'll need a CMU login).

Say you're leading office hours for a class and the number of people waiting starts to grow. Just create a queue, called say "15-122", and throw up a link to https://cq.jez.io/15-122 on the board. This saves board space, eliminates the need for arrows when the queue grows too long for one column, and comes with a bunch of other features.

Features

Andrew account log ins

You don't have to create an account to log in; simply log in using your existing Andrew username and password.

It's mobile friendly

Having to open up your laptop just to check a checkbox is crazy. ⌘ + Queue was designed mobile first, so everything works on mobile just like you'd expect it to.

Real-time updates

You don't even have to refresh the page to see the current state of the queue.

Students are always busy, so sometimes it's hard to know you'll be productive by going to office hours. With ⌘ + Queue, students can check anywhere what the approximate wait time will be.

Private Queues

Don't like that it updates in real time with a list of all the students who are at office hours? Queue owners can make their queues private.

Multiple owners

Invite your fellow TA's to the queue so you all can cross people off.

That doesn't seem like a lot of features

You're right. Simplicity is key; there's no clutter and no cruft.

That being said, if you think it's missing a feature, feel free to implement it and open a pull request!

Why build this?

I put this together mostly just to have something to tinker on and try out a few new technologies. Here's a quick run down of the pieces involved:

• Node.js with CoffeeScript everywhere
• Passport.js for authentication with your Andrew account
• Sequelize and PostgreSQL for storage
• Socket.io for real-time updates
• React for client-side templating
• React Router for client-side routing
• Mailgun for sending transactional emails (I get exception notification emails)

The thing about a queue service is that it's just a step up from a Todo app, so it's got just the right amount of complexity to let you see where certain technologies shine or don't.

Setup

You can run this using Heroku (or more generally, foreman). It uses the same build tooling as TuneMachine, so I'm not going to duplicate the setup instructions. The only thing that's different will be setting all the config variables. Copy .env.template to .env and fill in the corresponding values.

License

MIT license. See LICENSE.