Occuped: Twine + Go + App Engine

In our NY office We've got 40 people working in a space with two bathrooms. Walking to the bathrooms, finding them both occupied, and grabbing a snack instead is a regular occurrence. For a lark I took a Twine with the breakout board and a few magnetic switches and connected them to the over taxed bathroom doors.

The good folks at Twine will invoke a web hook on state change, so I created a tiny webapp in Go that takes the GET from Twine and stashes it in the App Engine datastore. I wrote a cheesy web front end to show the current state based on the most recent change. It also exposes a JSON API, allowing my excellent coworkers to build a native OS X menulet and a much nicer web version.