Introduction

Booking a consultation should be straightforward for the person making the appointment. Behind the scenes, however, an automated booking system has to coordinate several moving parts: collecting customer information, checking availability, scheduling an event, generating a meeting link, saving the booking, and notifying the people involved.

I encountered these challenges while developing the booking system for JOPAD Advisory. I built the system from scratch, using Node.js and Express for the backend, MongoDB for storing bookings, Google Calendar for scheduling, Google Meet for virtual meetings, and Resend for email notifications.

In this article, I'll walk through how I implemented the booking workflow, how the different services work together, and some of the engineering considerations that come with connecting external APIs to a backend application.

1. The Architecture

The backend coordinates the booking process.…