Finding A Bed Tonight

It's 11:14 PM. Darius has a family of five and 30 minutes. He filters by population type — the app shows only shelters that can serve this family right now.

Three shelters have beds. Green badges mean the data was updated in the last hour — no more calling a shelter only to find out they filled up two hours ago.

Darius taps a shelter to see the details — pets allowed, wheelchair accessible, updated 12 minutes ago. This one works.

One tap holds the bed for 90 minutes — enough time to drive the family across town safely. No one else can claim it while Darius is in transit.

Darius is between clients now — driving to meet a second family his supervisor radioed about. He hits a dead zone. The yellow banner is honest: your searches are still here, and anything you do next will be saved and sent when signal comes back.

He finds a bed that works and taps hold — no signal, doesn't matter. The app tells him it's queued and shows it alongside his active holds. When he gets signal back, it will send. He keeps driving.

Two miles later, signal comes back. The hold sends automatically — 79 minutes on the clock. If someone else had taken that bed while he was offline, the app would tell him that too. No silent failures. No guessing.

Meanwhile, Sandra checks her dashboard between intake tasks. She can see every shelter's occupancy and how fresh the data is — one glance tells her where the gaps are.

Sandra updates her shelter's bed count in three taps — total, occupied, done. The system calculates available beds automatically. Every update refreshes the data for outreach workers like Darius in real time.

Darius works with Spanish-speaking families too. One tap switches the entire interface — labels, errors, badges, everything — to Spanish. No page reload, no second app.

Back at the office, the CoC administrator manages who has access. Each role sees only what they need — DV shelter access is a separate, deliberate toggle, and if someone's credentials are compromised, the admin resets their password in one click.

Every shelter in the community is here — address, capacity, constraints, edit history. New shelters can be added one at a time or bulk-imported from an HSDS 3.0 or 211 CSV file. Each shelter is editable — phone numbers, hours, DV status — with role-based permissions that protect sensitive fields.

Temperature drops below freezing tonight. The administrator activates surge mode — overflow beds become visible to every outreach worker immediately.

The CoC already uses Microsoft 365. The admin adds their SSO provider — staff sign in with existing credentials. No new passwords to manage.

Tenant-scoped authentication — each CoC has its own login with email, password, and optional SSO. Darius's credentials are issued by his CoC administrator. Every session is JWT-based with automatic token refresh.

When the CoC requires it, users enroll in TOTP two-factor authentication — Google Authenticator, Authy, or any standard authenticator app. After entering their password, they verify with a 6-digit code. Lost device? Backup codes or an admin-generated access code gets them back in.

Darius can change his own password from any screen — one tap on "Password" in the header opens the modal. If his phone is lost, the CoC admin resets it from the Users tab. All existing sessions are invalidated immediately.

Locked out? Lost your authenticator? The CoC administrator generates a one-time access code — 15 minutes to use it, single-use, and the user must change their password immediately after. No one waits until Monday for IT support.

For teams that want operational visibility — search volume, response times, stale shelters, DV safety canaries — all in one Grafana dashboard, deployed alongside the app.

When something is slow, distributed tracing shows exactly where the time went — from API request to database query. Enabled at runtime, no redeployment needed.