Señor Bagel Duty
I am in charge of the sunday hospitality ministry at church and one of my jobs is to make sure we have volunteers to prepare and distribute food post-mass for each of our three Sunday masses. I decided to automate this process of procuring and ensuring our volunteers attend by leveraging a weekly github actions flow that pulls our online excel file with our signups, parses the data, matches the names to actual members in our hospitality GroupMe via our GroupMe dev API, and either reminds our volunteers that are currently signed up that they are scheduled or pings the chat and asks for volunteers to fill the empty slot(s).
I wanted to highlight this project because I think it is a great example of how I can use my programming skills to make a difference in my immediate
community. Like many computer science students, I have built plenty of projects that are more technically sophisticated than this one but do not have
any real users or improve anyone's life in a tangible way. This project though is a great way that I was able to help my church community, which is not
a particularly technical demographic, by improving their operations workflows. After building this project my manager sat down with me and asked if I could
explain to her how it works, how I could structure it so it could be easily maintained by other student volunteers after I graduate, and potentially work
with some of our other ministries to see if we could improve their workflows as well.
Source code available here