ANU RoomFlow

A simpler way to find and book study spaces at ANU. RoomFlow replaces the usual scavenger hunt for a free room — browse study spaces across campus by building, name and capacity, see what’s already booked on a given day, and book a slot with just a Student ID. No login, no institutional booking portal account, no timetable clash-checking spreadsheet: pick a room, pick a time, you’re in. Bookings live in a real database and survive a reload, and you can look yours up (and cancel one) later by re-entering the same Student ID.

What good looks like here

Good, here, is a service that feels like it could actually replace the ANU room-booking system a student deals with today: plain, predictable, and honest about what it does and doesn’t do. I decided against an account system entirely — a Student ID typed into a form is enough friction to make cancellation meaningful (only the ID that made a booking can cancel it) without building real authentication for a one-week prototype. I decided against any client-side JavaScript for the booking flow: every action is a plain HTML form POST with a 303 redirect, which keeps the whole core flow testable with bare fetch() calls and means the app degrades to nothing fancier than a 2005-era web form — appropriate for a service whose only job is “let me book a room,” not a demo of interactivity.

What I chose not to build: recurring bookings, room search/filtering beyond a date, editing an existing booking (cancel and rebook covers it), and any admin view for managing rooms — RoomFlow seeds a fixed, realistic set of ANU spaces (Hancock Library study rooms, a Marie Reay classroom, a Chifley meeting room, a CSIT seminar room, a Kambri collaboration room) rather than letting anyone create rooms, since “browse and book what’s already there” is the actual problem, not “manage a room inventory.”

Enforced by spec/ (see spec/booking.test.ts):

• a booking persists across a reload, checked via an independent second route (create it, then fetch /bookings/ fresh and it’s still there)
• two bookings can’t overlap for the same room and time
• a booking can only be cancelled with the Student ID it was made under
• the seeded rooms show up with their real details (building, name, capacity)

Judged at the crit, not testable: whether this reads as a believable replacement for ANU’s actual room-booking experience rather than a generic CRUD demo, and the account in PROCESS.md of how the work was directed, grounded and corrected.

Images go in public/ and are linked relatively — ![alt](public/before.png) — which renders on GitHub and at /readme/ alike.