Today was spent primarily troubleshooting inconsistencies in our calendar event loading system and beginning the integration of our time tracking module with the new PHP/Laravel backend.
The morning began with investigating reports of intermittent issues where some shifts wouldn’t appear properly in certain calendar views. After methodical debugging, I identified several root causes:
First, there was an inconsistency in how date ranges were being calculated between the frontend calendar component and our backend API. The calendar was requesting events using an inclusive start date but exclusive end date (a common JavaScript convention), while our API was interpreting both dates as inclusive. This off-by-one error occasionally caused events on range boundaries to be missed. I standardized the approach across both systems, ensuring consistent date handling.
Another issue stemmed from how recurring shifts were being processed. Some complex recurrence patterns weren’t generating all expected occurrences due to a logical error in the recurrence expansion algorithm. I refactored this code to correctly handle all recurrence types, including complex patterns like “every third Wednesday” or shifts that repeat with exclusions for holidays.
I also discovered a caching issue where shift updates weren’t consistently invalidating the relevant cache entries, occasionally causing stale data to be displayed. I implemented a more robust cache invalidation strategy that identifies all potentially affected cache keys whenever a shift record is modified, ensuring users always see the most current data.
In the afternoon, I shifted focus to integrating the time tracking module with our calendar system. This module handles clock-in and clock-out operations, calculating work hours, and tracking attendance against scheduled shifts. The integration requires careful coordination since time tracking events need to be visually represented alongside scheduled shifts in the calendar interface.
I began by designing the database schema for time tracking records, creating migrations for tables that store clock events, calculated work hours, and attendance statuses. The schema includes appropriate relationships to shift records, allowing for efficient queries that combine scheduling and attendance data.
For the API layer, I created endpoints that handle clock operations, validation against scheduled shifts, and attendance status calculations. These endpoints implement business rules like preventing clock-ins for shifts that haven’t started yet or automatically marking employees as late based on configurable thresholds.
I also started work on the visual integration between time tracking data and the calendar display. This involves adding visual indicators that show attendance status directly on shift blocks in the calendar—green checkmarks for on-time attendance, yellow warning icons for late arrivals, and red indicators for missed shifts. These indicators provide managers with at-a-glance insight into attendance patterns across their team.
By the end of the day, I had resolved the major inconsistencies in calendar event loading and made significant progress on the time tracking integration. Tomorrow I’ll focus on completing the clock-in/out functionality and ensuring it works seamlessly with the calendar interface.