We built a meeting room booking app in a day

Here at GoCardless we recently moved into shiny new offices in Angel and with our new expanse of space comes three nice new meeting rooms.

Now that we’re approaching 60+ employees, we decided that it’s time for a little bit more organisation around how we book out these spaces for meetings projects.

In our most recent hackday, this became the subject of one of our hacks.

Like a lot of startups & small businesses we already use a ton of SaS products (Trello, Github, Gmail, Desk to name just a few) and we were keen to not add another name to that list. Instead, we wanted something as close to the instant usability of pen & paper, but with all the benefits you get from using a digital product.

With this in mind, we made some decisions early on that would shape our product and limit our scope to something we could achieve in a day.

• To discourage long meetings of arbitrary length, we split the day into 30 minute blocks from 9am to 6pm. You could have an hour meeting, but you’ll have to book twice for it
• You can only book meetings for today only, not tomorrow or next week
• There should be no login or sign up to reduce any friction to using the product

We quickly decided on a paradigm for the UI that would work nicely within these constraints. We’d show each block of time in a list, and knock blocks off the top as the day goes on. This simple idea barely changed from sketch to implemented design with the only addition being navigation between different meeting rooms.

When it came to building this thing we quickly settled on Meteor, a Javascript framework that allowed us to write the server and frontend in the same language.

By default, Meteor uses Mongo as a datastore which fitted perfectly with the simple nature of the metadata we needed to persist. Simultaneously, we worked on a native iOS client using the ObjectiveDDP library to communicate with our Meteor backend and receive instant notifications of data changes to keep all clients in sync.

Come 6pm, we had a finished app that we named Rooms that we demoed to the company. It works beautifully on laptops, phones and tablets and is available open source on Github for you to use at your own office.