What Broke When We Scaled the Attendance System to 3 Institutions

The attendance system started as a single-institution tool: one set of classes, one admin role, one time zone. Rolling it out to a second and third institution exposed every shortcut I'd taken along the way.

The biggest issue was assuming a stable connection. One of the institutions had spotty wifi in classrooms, so attendance marking needed to work offline and sync later — that meant rethinking the data layer to queue writes locally instead of assuming every request would succeed immediately.

Roles were the other surprise. 'Admin' meant something different at each institution, so I had to move from hardcoded permissions to a proper role/permission table instead of trying to special-case each school.

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