jasonflorentino / you-up

Quickly check if you can ring your remote friends

⏰ You Up?

Quickly check if you can ring your remote friends

What is this?

My friend Steve told me he was looking for a quick and simple way to check who among his distributed friend group might be up for a chat. I, always wanting to give my weekend away to code something fun, said "Why don't I make it for you!". So now I have double chores to do next weekend. Unless Steve has a feature request??? Enjoy!

— Jason, Jan 30, 2021

Live Site

Click here to view a live deployment on Vercel.

How Does It Work?

You tell it where your friend is, and it'll tell you if they're awake!

First, a note about security

The app runs entirely in the browser and stores the stuff you give it in your browser's localstorage. This is great because no data is being sent anywhere, and yet your list of friends can persist across reloads and revists. However, localstorage is not a secure store. While the localstorage object the browser gives us is specific to this URL, it's unencrypted and freely accessible to anyone with physical access to the device — Don't store any sensitive information in here. This also means that if you clear your browser data/cache, you may lose your list!

And now the rest

• Add a friend by clicking the + New Friend button, give them a name, and choose what timezone they're in. (This app gets its timezone data from a free web API)
• By default if it's between 7am and 11pm where they are, they're considered awake. You can change this by clicking the button displaying these times: 👋 07:00 - 23:00. This is a global change and will affect everybody in the list.
• Your friends' times are calculated relative to your current time, and your current time will be the time on whatever device you're using. I haven't been able to test this yet, but if you add people while in Eastern Time, and then access this site from the same device while in Pacific Time, your friends' awake status should adjust accordingly!
• You can edit a friend's details by clicking the edit icon between to their time difference and the trash icon.
• Clicking the trash icon (last in their row) removes that friend.

Future Ideas, maybe:

• Setup some sort of cache for the timezone data so that we can automatically keep it up to date (see below), but without running into rate limits for that service.

In no particular order

• Add a sample image of the page to this doc.
• Add name to the delete confirmation dialog.
• Collapse friend actions into single menu, so as to remove clutter from individual rows.
• Put global settings in a settings dialog.
• Configure Awake time for individual friends.

Nerdy Details

• This a NextJs app built with plain JavaScript and ChakraUI
• The current Timezome data strategy is to use Next's getStaticProps to fetch the timezones at build time and package that data witht the pre-rendered app. This way we don't need to request timezone data with each page load. (The free API limits usage to 1 request per second.) One drawback of this is that if the timezone data changes (For example if a timezone enters or leaves Daylight Savings Time) then we would have to rebuild the page to ensure the data we have is up to date. So there is a chance certain times may be off by an hour. And I haven't looked into how many timezones observe DST or when they enter and leave it.