My second project for the Flatiron online self-paced software engineering program aims to provide a simple organizational tool for caretakers of all kinds to compile the critical information needed to care for their dependents.
There are many reasons that a caretaker may have to hand off responsibilities to another family member or friend, it could be an emergency, a vacation, even their own death unfortunately.
The idea came to me originally because, as the working mother of three very busy children I realized that I held most of the details regarding their lives in my head. Sadly, I imagined that in the event of an untimely death, no one would have the information necessary to provide seamless care for them during a very tragic time. While my husband is an incredible father, I tend to be the primary caretaker in our household; and it would serve him well to have access to the critical information that lives in my brain. We use a calendar app that is very helpful for our family in many ways, but what it lacks is a simple interface for documenting the information necessary to care for our dependents. While mapping out my project, I realized that rather than limiting this application to the parent/child relationship I needed to generalize the required information so that caretakers of other types of dependents would be able to utilize this application as well.
In Caretaker Concierge, a dependent can be anything you care for; a child, a pet, an elderly parent, a spouse, even your house! Their activities may include athletics, feeding schedules, home health aide information, and maintenance schedules. Due to time and knowledge constraints, this application is currently a very simple version of the app I hope to develop in the future. Some of my stretch goals include: allowing the user to select a “type” of dependent which would then determine the attributes of the dependent; displaying only the information that the user chooses to fill in on the activity show page; and allowing users to share an account, e.g. two parents of the same children/pets/household, children of the same elderly parent, etc.
I learned a lot during the Sinatra project phase, and though I’m looking forward to getting back to labs with test suites and green check boxes on lessons, I really enjoyed challenging myself and building something that will hopefully become useful to people in the future!
If you’re interested in checking it out, or have any helpful feedback, here’s a link to the github repo: https://github.com/ortufte/caretaker-concierge
Here’s a link to the video walkthru I did, showing what a user is able to do with the app at this point in time: https://youtu.be/iTpFmEAkVOI