A design school with a full fabrication lab was scheduling it on a whiteboard.

Nobody asked me to build this. I noticed that the Siebel Center for Design machine shop logged every appointment on a whiteboard — who had which machine, and when. That means no record of who is next, no way to know if a machine is free without walking over, and nothing to show anyone at the end of the semester about how the shop is actually used.

So I scoped the problem with the people who run the shop, validated the solution with them before writing code, and built it against what they said they’d actually use.

The interface is Discord, because that’s where the students already were — no new app to install, no account to make. You book a machine in the channel; the booking lands on a dashboard showing who’s on what right now, and the system messages you when you’re next in the queue.

The part the staff cared about most: a built-in agent that answers questions about usage — which machines get used, by whom, for how long — and writes the report they take to their own stakeholders. The whiteboard couldn’t produce evidence. This does, without anyone learning a BI tool.