Kendro

A virtual co-working space — take a desk, say what you're working on, and work the block alongside your team, your friends, or whoever else is in the room.

Open it Read the source

My role: Solo — product, client, server, schema
Timeline: 2025 — ongoing
Core stack: React 18 · Vite · Tailwind v4

what's in it

Features

Sessions are the unit, rooms are optional: A Session can have room: null. That one nullable field is the difference between 'sign up and start working' and 'sign up, find a room, request to join, wait for a stranger to approve you' — and the grid, stats and presence all read the same collection either way.
A floor of desks, not a call: Every person is a nameplate carrying their name, their work topic and a clock since they sat down; video fills the desk only when the camera is on. Camera-off is the common case in co-working, so it gets a real state instead of a black rectangle.
Presence is one query: GET /sessions/live resolves everyone you share a team, room or friendship with and returns their open sessions with the connection labelled, so the dashboard can't drift from what the team page shows.
Chat channels are reconciled, not hooked: POST /chat/sync diffs your rooms and teams against your Stream channels and fixes the difference. Hooking eight mutation sites instead means any one failing quietly strands you in a channel for a room you left; the reconcile is idempotent and heals rooms that predate chat.
Durations are never trusted from the wire: actualDuration is derived server-side, has break time subtracted and is capped at twice the session's own target. A throttled sweep closes anything that stops sending a heartbeat, flags it abandoned, and abandoned rows are excluded from every aggregate.
The paywall is one line, in one place: createTeam checks user.plan. Nothing else does — so an invited member gets the whole team experience without an upgrade, and a pricing change touches a single function.
Team rooms are private by construction: getAllRooms only returns rooms whose team is null or one of yours, and requestToJoinRoom re-checks membership before admitting anyone. Visibility and access are enforced separately, so neither is the only thing between a stranger and a company room.
One hook owns "in session": The dashboard, sidebar and session page all read useActiveSession, so they can't disagree — the dashboard used to offer 'take a desk' to someone already mid-session.
A record that buckets by your calendar: Every finished session fills a square on a contribution grid, bucketed by the user's local date, so a session closed at 11pm lands on the day it felt like.
Invites that degrade instead of failing: Team invites go out over Gmail SMTP; with the credentials unset — or the send failing — the invite is still created and the toast offers a shareable link, so a mail outage can't stop a team being built.

a look around

What it looks like in use

A room with two desks, each showing a person, their current task and a running clock, with a session panel alongside — Two people at their desks with a task list and clock beside them. Desks lay out with `auto-fill` rather than viewport breakpoints, because the session panel takes 384px out of the column those breakpoints assume.
presence is the point

The dashboard with weekly hours, a contribution grid, live presence and the rooms and teams you belong to — Hours and a year of squares first, then who else is at a desk right now — one `/sessions/live` call across teams, rooms and friends.

A running session with a countdown, task checklist and a note field for how it went — Breaks come off the clock, so "49 minutes worked" means work, not the timer being open.

The conversations list with a channel per room and per team, plus direct messages — A channel per room and per team, created from the database rather than by hand — joining a room adds its conversation, leaving takes it away.

A team page showing live presence, team rooms and members with hours and roles — Who's at a desk, hours logged this week per person, and the rooms only members can open. Creating a team is the paid part; joining one never is.

The dashboard on a phone with stats, contribution grid and rooms stacked — The stat row and the grid fold to one column; nothing is hidden behind a 'view on desktop' notice.
same room, one hand

A room floor on a phone with one desk and the call controls docked at the bottom — The floor keeps its desk nameplates on a phone, with the call controls docked where a thumb already is.

what it's made of

The stack

Client: React 18
Vite
Tailwind v4
DaisyUI 5
TanStack Query
Zustand
React Router 7
Server: Node
Express 4
Mongoose
JWT
bcrypt
Data: MongoDB (Atlas)
Services: Stream (chat + video)
Nodemailer over Gmail
ImgBB