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Parker Van Ham
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Sous kitchen scheduling dashboard showing weekly schedule grid, shift assignments, and AI assistant panel

Sous

In Development

Full-Stack Developer

An AI-powered staff scheduling platform for high-volume kitchens that combines a constraint-optimization solver with a conversational AI assistant to automate and streamline shift planning. Managers interact with a natural-language chat interface to generate, review, and refine schedules while the system enforces labor rules, availability, and coverage requirements behind the scenes. This project is actively in development — next steps include further refining the AI assistant and building an accompanying mobile app for on-the-go staff management.

Key Contributions

  • Architected a full-stack Next.js 16 (App Router) application with a strict three-layer architecture — React UI, Server Actions, and Mongoose services — supporting multi-organization and multi-location data scoping.
  • Built an agentic AI chat assistant using the Vercel AI SDK and GPT-4o with a custom tool registry, enabling managers to query schedule health, propose shift swaps, and trigger schedule generation through natural-language conversation.
  • Engineered an OR-Tools CP-SAT constraint solver microservice in Python (FastAPI) that optimally assigns staff to station-time slots under hard and soft constraints including hour limits, clopening prevention, manager coverage, and fairness balancing.
  • Designed an async task pipeline that bridges the Next.js app and the Python solver, with background job polling, real-time status updates in the chat UI, and a proposal-based approval workflow for generated schedules.
  • Implemented a visual schedule builder with weekly grid views, drag-friendly shift editing, labor requirement configuration, and a dashboard featuring live metrics on coverage, labor hours, and staffing ratios.
  • Integrated Clerk authentication with role-based access control, Stripe billing with checkout and customer portal flows, and Clerk/Stripe webhook handlers for event-driven state synchronization.

Technologies

  • Next.js 16 & React 19
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind CSS & shadcn/ui
  • MongoDB & Mongoose
  • OpenAI GPT-4o (Vercel AI SDK)
  • OR-Tools CP-SAT (Python / FastAPI)
  • Clerk Authentication
  • Stripe Billing
  • TanStack Query
View Source Code on GitHub