It's been a long time since anything has happened to this page, due to being pretty busy with university. My university is closed until the 20th of April which means that I have a lot of free time on my hands.
But sitting at home get's boring pretty quick so a big thanks to all of my friends over at https://cow-gaming.de (gaming community) who gave me an idea of what to do.

To fully understand everything, I must give you some background first:
We have a TeamSpeak3 server where all of us come together to enjoy playing video games. TS3 servers are public by default so everyone can join, but someone has to pay for the renting fees. The fees depend on how many clients can be at once on the server. To keep the costs down, our leaders decided that guests can only join a so-called "Support Waiting Room". One of the online supporters will then move them and ask, why they are here like if they want to join the community, or they are visiting a friend who's already playing here.

The rules of the community are simple:
The primary rule is that real life always comes first, no matter what. And this applies to everyone, casual members as well as high up staff.
During COVID-19 we have an increased amount of people around which also means more guests, but not more support staff at the time being. This results in periods where no support staff is online more often, especially during the day.

The leader's idea:

Her idea was pretty straight n forward: "I'm at home but I can't be on my PC 24/7. Can I somehow get a notification to my phone if somebody is waiting?"
Sure it is, we just need a small bot that checks whether anyone is available or not. In the second step just send a push notification to the leader's phone. All seems pretty easy except that I was unable to find an app that was suitable for this case.

So let's go, DIY:
I've been thinking about learning Android App Development for quite some time so this was the chance. So I started reading the Android Documentation and created a simple UI. Upon doing my research about notifications in Android, I stumbled upon Firebase. Firebase is a service provided by Google that handles background notification and a ton of more stuff.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, I've stuck with Firebase until now, because behind that are devs who are way more experienced with that whole Android Ecosystem than I am after about a week or so.
Et voilá, there we have our support notifications!

More than just notifications
Over the last month, I started to enjoy working with Android and here I am, thinking about stuff that would be cool to have in an app.