Goodbye RSVP app!

8 years ago, we tried an experiment at Rajan’s suggestion. We forked a baby open source app and made it our own. We just started with the idea of making the WhatsApp group less noisy with all the call-ins, but over these years we added a whole bunch of features with ideas from y’all, like Google based logins, posts for long-lived content, media sharing, shared calendar, Secret Santa, etc.

In the last couple of years, the app hasn’t been getting enough love. A plain-old RSVP app shouldn’t need much, but we added a bunch of personally identifiable information (PII) to the app, to make team management easier. I have been worrying about all this PII for months now. We now have a new app from KUPA who will do this properly now.

As a goodbye, I thought it’d be fun to write up a summary post.

Some features via numbers

Though it’s called an “RSVP app”, over time we ended up adding a bunch of features that we felt would make it easier to manage the team.

Events

Obviously, the Events and the RSVP feature was the most used. In a span of 8 years, we had around ~1300 events – most of them are practices that actually happened, but some cancelled ones too alongside other events like tournament call-ins, Secret Santa lists to some bachelorette parties and wedding reception RSVPs too! I was so happy to see that the most attended event happened to be the 10th Anniversary Celebration of TIKS. 🎉

1150+ practices across 420 weeks averages to about 2.8 sessions per week, which is crazy considering the multiple waves of COVID-19 and the fact that Saturday pick-ups are no longer a thing.

WhatsApp noise

How much WhatsApp noise did we cut-down for real? By using the app, we avoided sending around 17,000 messages or about 40 messages a week with just names in them. If we put all these names together into a document, at over 150k words, it’d be somewhere in between the length of Prisoner of Azkaban and the Goblet of Fire.

Posts

We added the posts functionality to share messages with longer-term value in a place where they wouldn’t get buried and lost in the WhatsApp chat. But, we only had 40 posts overall, a bunch of which were re-shared articles we’d found elsewhere.

I’ve archived 3 articles written by humans in the pre-AI era, on this site, even if just for AI to now learn from 🤷. WhatsApp has a knack of making things feel “easier”, or maybe we just don’t mind it because of how much time we all seem to spend on it!

Photos

I’ve always felt that this feature wasn’t used enough (to satisfy my urge to archive), but we’ve had 2600+ photos in 65 or so albums shared via the app. About 8 albums a year, doesn’t sound that bad at all!

There was certainly some friction in uploading media via this app in a large part because I chose to use Google Drive as a storage and permission mechanism and not do our own media store. It meant we had limited control on the share workflow and whose Google Drive storage limits get used. But, it is also this decision that today makes it easy to retain all the media and access permissions without much hassle. I’ve tried to preserve the index of the shared albums in this post’s appendix. I’ll definitely miss the collage of random photos I’d see each time I opened the app on my laptop, though.

Secret Santa

Like a lot of other (unused) features on this app, I over engineered how we organized Secret Santa too. The app randomized and automatically assigned kiddos to the Santas and emailed them the deets. We organized 8 editions of these, one every year, though we’ve all had our share of Santas from the “southern hemisphere”.

Stuff that you didn’t know existed

In a long list of other over-engineered things, there were:

• a shared Google calendar with people’s birthdays synced to it. 120+ people had entered their birthdays into the app.
• a Zulip bot that announced new RSVP events or posts and allowed folks to call-in without opening the RSVP app.
• an interactive chart on user profiles to see their own attendance with filtering options like day of week, etc.
• a Progressive Web App to allow “installing” the app on your phone’s home screen and make it easy to share media via the app.
• and even an Onesta easter egg (inspired by Aki) to easily find team-mates who qualify to use Onesta’s weekly offers based on letter sequences in names.

The Development

Who thought a simple RSVP app would need 750+ commits? More than 2/3rds of this work was in 2018 and 2019, and then there was the COVID lull. Almost all the commits were mine, but your feature requests, suggestions, complaints and excitement are what fueled it. What started as just an experiment to escape an annoyance turned into an exciting side-project. Thank you 💛!

Outro

If you enjoyed this post or using the app, feel free to buy me a coffee at One All, Y-Ultimate, or Project KHEL and let me know!

See you on the field!

Photo Appendix