Nest

The Challenge

Managing a household of six people across different ages, responsibilities, and schedules is a coordination problem most software doesn't solve well. Generic task apps don't support multiple simultaneous users with different roles and views. Shared calendar apps don't connect to chores and rewards. Meal planning lives in a different app from the grocery list, which lives in a different app from the weekly schedule.

The specific constraint here made it harder: the solution had to work simultaneously across three different surfaces — a large always-on Android touchscreen mounted in a common area (the kiosk), individual Kindle Fire HD10 tablets for each of four kids, and a full admin panel for parents — all showing different things to different users at the same time.

Off-the-shelf tools couldn't get there.

Our Solution

We built Nest as a Blazor WebAssembly application with three fully distinct interface layers, all backed by a single ASP.NET Core Minimal API and a PostgreSQL database running on Railway:

Three Surfaces, One System

• Kiosk (/): An always-on display showing every family member's tasks in parallel columns, a bounty board of available one-off tasks, today's meals, upcoming calendar events, and a live weather widget. Polls every 60 seconds with no user interaction required.
• Personal Dashboard (/me/{memberId}): PIN-gated per-member view on each Kindle tablet. Shows that member's assigned tasks with completion buttons, step-by-step routines with a progress bar, their earned badges, the rewards store, and a recent activity history.
• Admin Panel (/admin): Full management UI for parents — CRUD for tasks, routines, meals, recipes, family members, badges, and rewards, plus a Google Calendar integration view and a completion audit timeline with point revoke capability.

Key Features

• Task Stealing Mechanic: Kids can "steal" another member's task via a confirmation popup on the kiosk — earning the points themselves. Stolen tasks show as crossed-out with a red STOLEN badge in the original assignee's column, and the admin activity feed tracks steals separately from normal completions.
• Points Economy: Every task and routine step earns configurable points. Kids spend points in the rewards store on admin-defined rewards, with an optional approval queue for high-value redemptions.
• Badge System: 29 SVG achievement badges across categories (consistency, explorer, teamwork, earlybird, nightowl, quality) with bronze/silver/gold/legendary tiers. Auto-award logic triggers on total tasks, total points, and completion streaks.
• Meal Planning + Grocery: Admin plans a full week of meals from a recipe library. A single button generates a consolidated grocery list from the week's ingredients.
• Google Calendar Integration: Live calendar events fetched via a Google service account, surfaced on the kiosk and admin panel.
• Weather Widget: Current conditions pulled from the NWS API with a 15-minute cache — no API key required.

Infrastructure

• .NET 10 + Blazor WebAssembly (prerendering disabled for simplicity at this scale)
• Dapper + Npgsql — no EF Core; direct SQL with snake_case column mapping
• Railway for hosting and PostgreSQL (same project, $5/mo Hobby tier)
• Cloudflare Worker for the nightly meal-plan cron at 4 AM UTC

The Result

Nest is live and actively used by the family it was built for. Every core feature is working: the kiosk runs on its wall-mounted Android display, each kid has their own PIN-gated tablet view, and parents manage the household from the admin panel. The task-stealing mechanic alone drove a measurable uptick in voluntary chore completion — kids started competing for each other's tasks.

The project also serves as a real-world proving ground for multi-surface Blazor architecture at household scale, with a clean separation between the shared domain model, the server API, and the WASM client.

Technologies Used

• .NET 10 with Blazor WebAssembly (client-side interactivity)
• ASP.NET Core Minimal API (server-side endpoints)
• Dapper + Npgsql for direct PostgreSQL access (no ORM)
• PostgreSQL on Railway
• Google Calendar API via service account
• NWS Weather API with server-side caching
• Cloudflare Workers for scheduled cron jobs
• Railway for containerized hosting and managed database