The Problem
During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, vaccine slots were booking out in seconds. Users had to manually refresh the CoWIN portal hundreds of times a day, often missing their chance.
The Solution
I built an automated Availability Tracker that polled the government’s public API and alerted users instantly via email when a slot opened in their specific district.
- Architecture: A Django backend running scheduled cron jobs on an AWS EC2 instance to poll API endpoints efficiently without hitting rate limits.
- Delivery: Integrated SMTP services to blast real-time notifications to subscribers.
- Impact: The project went viral on LinkedIn, solving a critical need for hundreds of families.
Key Metrics
- 10,000+ Emails sent in the first week.
- 460+ Registered users across India.
- 100% Uptime during peak traffic.