CSIALife

Overview

CSIALife is the school-wide platform students at CheongShim International Academy use for night study requests, seminar room bookings, timetables, meals, and room reservations. It runs at csialife.com with more than 600 users. The production source code stays private because it handles real student records, so every screen shown here uses fictional demo data.

• 

  Weekly night study requests

• 

  Seminar room booking

• 

  Timetable matched to each student ID

• 

  Weekly meals from the NEIS API

• 

  Music room reservations

The Problem

Every evening, students declare what they will do in each night study period: self-study, an after-school course, an outing, or a seminar room session. Teachers used to collect these by hand every day and type them into spreadsheets. CSIALife replaced that process, but as features piled up in the first version, the request logic developed a structural bug that left ghost records in the data teachers relied on.

Role

• Leader and developer: started as a co-developer alongside senior students and now leads development and maintenance
• Rebuilt the night study request logic after the ghost record bug
• Started a new codebase for the 2026–27 school year, the version running at csialife.com today
• Runs the system on Railway as three processes (web, Celery worker, Celery beat) on PostgreSQL and Redis
• Added daily snapshots of the teachers' sheet history so past records survive even after Google merges old versions

Architecture

System architecture

• Web: Django served by Gunicorn handles every page, form, and the admin
• Database: PostgreSQL stores requests, bookings, settings, and the daily sheet snapshots
• Background jobs: Celery beat publishes four scheduled jobs to Redis, and the Celery worker runs them
• Integrations: the Google Sheets API keeps the teachers' rosters in sync, and the NEIS Open API supplies the school meal menu

A Day in CSIALife

What runs when, on a school day

View data

Time	What happens
08:00–13:00	Seminar booking open
17:30–21:00	Today's night study column locked
00:10	Sheet snapshot
00:30	Seminar reset
13:00	Seminar sync
17:30	Night study sync

Scheduled jobs (Celery beat)

Job	When	What it does
Night study sync	17:30	Re-syncs every active request for the day into the teachers' sheet
Seminar sync	13:00	Writes the day's seminar room bookings to the sheet
Sheet history snapshot	00:10	Saves the previous day's sheet version to the database
Seminar reset	00:30	Clears past bookings so the next day starts clean

Modules

The 2026–27 codebase is split into 13 Django apps, one per service.

Apps and their data models

App	What it does	Models
Night study (yaja)	Weekly night study requests by period, synced to the teachers' sheet	NightStudyApplication, NightStudySettings, GoogleSheetSync, SheetSnapshot, SheetSnapshotEntry
Seminar rooms (seminar)	Room availability and group bookings	SeminarRoomAvailability, SeminarBooking
Timetable (timetable)	Weekly class timetable matched to each student ID, with electives	SubjectOption, StudentElectiveChoice
Meals (meal)	Weekly menu from the NEIS Open API	None, read live from the API
Music room (music_room)	Weekly music room reservations	MusicRoomBooking, MusicRoomSettings, MusicRoomSlotAvailability
Labs (lab)	Lab bookings with capacity, equipment, and status	Lab, LabBooking
Special rooms (special_room)	Special room reservations within opening hours	SpecialRoom, SpecialRoomReservation, SpecialRoomSettings
Exams (exams)	Exam timetable shown on the home screen ahead of each exam period	Exam, ExamSlot
Guidelines (guideline)	Guideline files uploaded by administrators	GuidelineFile
Home (home)	Dashboard with night study and reservation status	None
Login (login)	Sign-in and stale-form handling	None
Block Blast (blockblast)	Browser puzzle game with a scoreboard	BlockBlastScore, BlockBlastBan
Gomoku (gomoku)	Online gomoku with game records, challenges, and a match queue	GomokuProfile, GomokuGame, GomokuMove, GomokuChallenge, GomokuQueueEntry

Python code per app (lines, excluding migrations)

• Games
• School services

• Night study1,155
• Music room622
• Seminar rooms490
• Timetable479
• Special rooms350
• Exams330
• Labs309
• Home251
• Meals175
• Login152
• Guidelines143
• Gomoku3,049
• Block Blast282

View data

Item	Value
Night study	1,155
Music room	622
Seminar rooms	490
Timetable	479
Special rooms	350
Exams	330
Labs	309
Home	251
Meals	175
Login	152
Guidelines	143
Gomoku	3,049
Block Blast	282

Engineering Details

• Night study lock: today's column cannot be edited from 17:30 to 21:00, so the roster teachers receive at 17:30 stays fixed; every other day can be changed at any time
• Ghost record fix: at 17:30 the worker resets every active request for the day to unsynced and writes all of them to the teachers' sheet again
• Sheet history: at 00:10 the previous day's final sheet version is saved to the database, before Google merges old versions together
• Seminar rooms: bookings open on weekdays from 08:00 to 13:00 for up to six students; at 13:00 the day's bookings go to the sheet, and at 00:30 the previous day is cleared so the 08:00 opening starts clean
• Meals: NEIS caps date-range queries at five rows without an API key, which drops lunch and dinner, so the service asks for one day at a time and splits snack items out of dinner
• Music room: each week's reservations sync to their own worksheet tab, and slots already marked unavailable for class are never overwritten
• Stale forms: when a form expires because the user signed in or out in another tab, the page asks them to try again instead of showing a bare 403 error

Development

Commits per week to the 2026–27 codebase

• 104Sep 14
• 9Sep 21
• 35Sep 28
• 7Oct 5
• 0Oct 12
• 4Oct 19

View data

Item	Value
Sep 14	104
Sep 21	9
Sep 28	35
Oct 5	7
Oct 12	0
Oct 19	4

Stack

Django, Gunicorn, Celery, Redis, PostgreSQL, Google Sheets API, NEIS Open API, Railway