connorlynch.ca

After finishing college, A classmate and I moved into an apartment together. We immediately encountered a problem; the lobby buzzer only supported one phone number.

Searching for a solution I found services that would work with the building infrastructure, but during my search I found the resource to build my own and potentially cheaper. With that goal in mind I set out to make it more secure, cheaper, and feature dense. The first version accomplished the cheaper and secure using AWS secrets and lambda. The software was a cloud hosted function operating as a RESTful server, the function was most cost effective and the Twilio service needed server endpoints. Operating as a “man-in-the-middle” the lobby was given a phone number with a programmatic backend that would trigger the function dialing and connecting whoever picked up first.

When it came time for a revision I wanted to include the features I couldn't in the first version and solve some bugs that appeared. Including a mute feature became a growing necessity as with the tenants inviting friends on their own schedule caused friction. By text a date and time to the programmatic phone number the sender would not receive calls from the buzzer. This also remedied a deeper rooted bug in the system. If a connection could not be established to a phone, neither would be dialed leaving guests downstairs very frustrated.

At this time some issues and regrets still persist in this project. Since moving I no longer have the need to update this project. View the repo for more details