Buva Tracker

Overview

Buva Tracker helps social media virtual assistants monitor content deadlines across multiple client brands. It tracks pages and holiday schedules, computes days remaining before materials are due, and sends automated Telegram alerts at 7-day and 2-day thresholds — keeping the whole team aligned without manual check-ins.

The Problem

Social media virtual assistants juggle content deadlines across multiple client brands and holiday calendars, with no shared view of what's due when. Tracking due dates in spreadsheets and chat threads meant missed deadlines, last-minute scrambles, and constant manual check-ins — there was no reliable, automatic reminder that materials were coming due.

The Solution

A single web app tracks every client page and holiday across brands, computes the days remaining before each item is due, and automatically pushes Telegram alerts to the team at 7-day, 2-day, and overdue thresholds. The team works from one shared dashboard and gets nudged without anyone having to remember to chase deadlines.

Key Features

• Per-platform content tracker with days-remaining at a glance
• Multi-brand holiday scheduler (recurring + one-time)
• Automated Telegram alerts: 7-day warning, 2-day urgent, overdue
• Heartbeat monitoring confirms uptime and delivery health

Tech Stack & Why

• Node.js + Express — A lean server for a CRUD + cron app the team hits from the browser.
• Turso (libSQL/SQLite edge) — SQLite-simple but hosted and edge-ready — no heavy DB ops for a small team tool.
• node-cron — Dead-simple scheduling for the daily threshold checks that drive the alerts.
• Telegram Bot API — The team already lives in Telegram, so alerts land where they’ll actually be seen.

Biggest Challenge

Making alerts trustworthy. A daily cron that naively re-checks thresholds would spam the team with duplicate reminders. The fix is deduplication keyed on page + threshold + target date, so each reminder fires exactly once — while updating a page's due date intentionally resets the key so fresh alerts can go out for the new date. Telegram delivery also fails gracefully, silently skipping when credentials aren't configured so the app never crashes on a missing integration.

Results & Impact

• Released as v1.0.0 (May 2026) and live on Render
• Replaced spreadsheet-and-chat deadline tracking for the VA team
• Multi-brand holiday scheduling with Telegram group-topic delivery
• Zero duplicate spam via page + threshold + date deduplication

What I Learned

Owning the backend taught me to model time and deadlines carefully — “days remaining” sounds trivial until time zones, recurring holidays, and overdue states get involved. Reliable cron + clear alert thresholds made the tool something the team actually relies on.