ANU Room Booking (student demo)

This is the ANU system I wish existed: a tiny, honest room-booking app. Pick a fictional study room, give your name and a time, and it’s booked — no login, no approval workflow, no calendar sync. Bookings persist in SQLite on the deployed machine’s volume, so they survive a reload and a redeploy, and an overlapping booking for the same room is rejected outright rather than silently double-booked.

What good looks like here

The brief was “build the ANU system you wish existed,” not “build all of ANU’s room-booking system.” Good here means the smallest version of that idea that’s actually trustworthy: a booking that’s accepted is really held (checked against every existing booking for that room, inside a transaction, not just against what happened to be on screen when the form was filled in), and a booking that survives a page reload also survives a server restart. That’s the one invariant I decided this app must never violate, and src/lib/bookings.ts’s overlap check plus spec/bookings.test.ts are what keep it protected.

Deliberately out of scope: accounts, permissions, room-availability calendars, email notifications, and recurring bookings. Each of those turns a weekend prototype into a real product; none of them changes whether the core promise — “booked means booked” — holds. CLAUDE.md records the working rules that came out of this scoping decision, and spec/ holds the checks that enforce both the course’s own harness (accessibility, README rendering, HTTPS/CSRF) and this app’s own behaviour (rooms and bookings).

Rooms are fictional demo data seeded at boot (src/lib/seed.ts) — “Nook 3B,” “Pod 7,” “Study Room 12” — not real ANU spaces, since this is a student prototype, not an integration with ANU’s actual booking systems.