Building it
Bellmen needed a phone app for registering luggage, finding stored bags and handling tasks from the dispatcher while moving around the resort.
I started building it in September 2025 and worked on it alone for the first few months. The backend was still being developed, so I built the screens against mock data: luggage registration, storage, task lists, scanning and photo uploads.
When another engineer joined in December, he connected the real services to the flows I’d built. I continued as technical lead as more engineers joined and we worked toward the first production release.
Making shared phones work
Each bellman picks up a phone at the dispatcher desk, uses it for a shift and returns it. The phone stays at the hotel, but the employee using it changes. The app needed to keep those two identities separate.
I made the phone’s registration persist across logouts while keeping its employee assignment tied to the current session. Staff could register a device once, and each bellman could take custody of it for their shift.
Logging out also needed to return the phone so someone else could use it. I added support for doing that from the app when a dispatcher wasn’t available to handle the return.
I carried the same shift boundary into monitoring. Session recordings reset when an employee signed out or their login expired, so we could investigate what happened during a particular shift without combining several people’s work into one long recording.
Keeping assignments current
A bellman might lock the phone, walk out of Wi-Fi coverage and reopen the app somewhere else in the building. The task list had to recover when that happened.
In production, some phones stopped showing new assignments until someone reloaded the page. I adapted a connection pattern already used in another internal app and added a fresh task lookup whenever the connection returned. Reconnecting alone wasn’t enough: the server didn’t replay assignments the phone had missed.
I also added an offline screen and a clean reload when the network returned. That gave staff a clear indication that the phone had lost connectivity and let the app recover when it came back.
The app launched in May 2026. By mid-October, recorded usage covered 105 phones across at least four resorts.