Room board

A live board for a handful of ANU Library group study rooms: who’s booked what today, what’s free right now, and a form to take a free slot or give one back. It’s a slice of the real thing — ANU Library’s group study room booking system, which lives behind a separate login on its own site and only ever shows you what’s booked, not what’s actually happening in a room right now.

What good looks like here

The one annoyance this prototype is built to fix: standing outside a room that’s shown as booked, with no way to tell from the booking system alone whether anyone’s actually turned up. So the board’s one piece of decoration — the red highlight on a booking — means exactly one thing: this slot is happening right now, computed from the wall clock in Canberra, not from whether someone remembered to check in. Everything else on the page is plain text; taste here is what didn’t get a colour.

Enforced by spec/booking.test.ts, driven against the deployed app, not the source:

• a booking made now is still there on a fresh page load (the brief’s core persistence promise)
• two bookings for the same room that overlap in time can’t both exist — the second is rejected and the first is untouched
• cancelling a booking frees the slot for someone else to take
• a booking made in one tab reaches another tab open on the same date, over the same server-sent-events stream the starter shipped with

Deliberately left out, as judgement calls rather than enforced rules: no login (the real system’s biggest source of friction, and out of scope for a prototype with no real ANU identities to check), no room search across all of ANU (three seeded rooms are enough to show the mechanic), and no recurring bookings (a booking board that only ever books one slot at a time is honest about what it models — a real timetable is a different, bigger system).