Charles
Apps & tools

HOMEROOM

The homeroom a virtual school does not give you. A synced, sign-in-gated family toolkit for one 8th grader that answers what do I do today, this week, and am I on track.

Status
Local buildin daily use
When
Jul to Aug 2026
Category
Apps & tools
Links

Virtual school hands a kid a list and a login. HOMEROOM is a signal board with a companion front. Today says what is first, This week shows each course against the school's own six-percent-per-week rule, and seven signals watch the log for the failure patterns that show up one to two weeks before a grade does.

The log takes words, not checkboxes. It runs offline, syncs across the family's devices, and has been in daily use since the school year started.

Screenshot coming
Today. First up, the day's log, the on-track strip.
Screenshot coming
This week, each course against the six-percent pace check.
Screenshot coming
The seven signals.

Stack

  • Vite, React 18, TypeScript, Tailwind, GSAP, Lenis, Zustand
  • Firebase Auth and Firestore with a UID-pinned rule
  • An offline-capable PWA
  • A headless QA harness
  • Cloudflare Workers prepared

Decisions

  1. It is a signal board, not a planner. A generic assignment tracker is the failure state.
  2. Every threshold is quoted from the school's published rule or from research, never tuned by feel.
  3. The log takes words because every documented failure pattern is detectable in writing within a week or two.

Lessons

  1. "Just save the document" is how a stale phone erases a week of work with no error. The merge logic looks over-complicated and is load-bearing.
  2. A build that carries a child's name must fail. The bundle check was proven against a deliberate leak, not just a passing case.