The story of Covid-19 vaccination appointments in India

Introduction

Another year of Covid-19 and this time, India got hit even harder. And who should be blamed… Let me see… maybe it is the people who thought that how worse can the virus be… Hold on… it should definitely be government’s responsibility that they couldn’t contain the spread of the virus. Leave it!

“अब पछताए होत क्या, चिडिया चुग गई खेत”

For the non-hindi speakers, it means there is no point in regreting late, when the action (birds spoiling the farm fields) has happened.

Anyway, the only source of hope was (and still is) vaccine. Before the second wave impacted India, people were reluctant to get vaccinated. Some waited for their perfect vaccine to come to be launched in India while others feared that the vaccines are not safe! However, the second wave kind of forced people to quickly take the vaccines. Also, government soon decided to allow vaccination for 18+ age category.

Hope you have a mental picture of this… India’s population numbers and the vaccination production/availability/procurement/injections…

When I sat down booking Covid-19 vaccination slot for my parents, I couldn’t find a single vaccination center with availability (all of them were booked!) I checked the next day… again no available slots. I found myself constantly refreshing the Cowin portal.

A few days more and I gave up! And that’s when I thought, if I am facing this problem, a lot of other people might be too. That’s how BookMyCovidShot was started.

I told this idea to my friends and a couple of them decided to join me in this initiative.

The idea

Create a simple website - to let users schedule notification alerts for Covid 19 vaccine availability according to their preferences - location(s), date range of vaccinations, vaccine brand and age criteria. And we will notify them when the slot is available according to their preference!

Timeline

We sat down like in a hackathon and coded the rough idea first, added features and kept on improving the overall user experience. Let me throw software jargon - Iterative and incremental development.

Moved the setup from our local machines to Heroku cluster.

And then purchased the domain bookmycovidshot.com

And then… plugged things in… 💥 BOOM

Of course it didn’t work in the first go. CNAME? DNS records? SSL certificates? What about these!?

Hmm… read about these and then like every pro-level coder, searched StackOverflow. I don’t remember finding some exact answers to my questions or not, but at least I was able to do everything what was needed.

The L day

Once things were stable, we decided to quickly launch the site - so that more people can benefit from this. And it was my first user facing product, I would hunbly call it a success.

On the day of launch, hundreds of users registered on the website. And the next day, the user count grew 3x.

Post launch, we continued to improve the site - adding new features, fixing issues, addressing user concerns.

The calm before the storm

Our IP was blocked from the Government’s server 🤕

Then moved from Heroku to AWS! 🚀

Closure notice

After running the app for around a month, we are happy that we were able to notify thousands of users of the vaccine availability. It might sound made up but in reality, I was able to schedule appointment for my parents with the notification I received from the app.

We decided to close the operations:

• High availability of vaccines
• The cost (maintenance, financial, etc.) vs pending user alerts analysis

Considering all this, we moved back from AWS to Heroku (just hosting static pages now)

Conclusion

To deliver this on time was the biggest challenge. The feedback we received from the users really made up for the hard days!