Overview
Cadence is a change management system that helps IT teams safely plan, approve, schedule, and review changes to their systems — the servers, applications, and services that an entire organization depends on. It models the full change lifecycle — request, risk-scored routing, conditional approvals, scheduled implementation, rollback planning, and post-implementation review — and gives change managers the calendar, audit trail, and reporting they need to run a weekly Change Advisory Board (CAB)
What it does
- Propose — Someone files a change request describing what they want to do and why.
- Score the risk — Cadence figures out how risky and impactful the change is, and uses that to decide who needs to sign off.
- Approve — The right reviewers are pulled in. Some changes need one person; some need a whole committee to agree.
- Schedule — The change gets a slot on a shared calendar that flags conflicts and protects "blackout" periods when nothing should change (like finals week or the holidays).
- Implement — The team carries it out, with a rollback plan ready in case it goes sideways.
- Review — Afterward, everyone looks back at what happened and records the lessons.
Tech Stack
- Frontend — Next.js 14 (App Router), TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, React Hook Form + Zod, TanStack Query, FullCalendar, Recharts, NextAuth.js
- Backend — FastAPI, SQLAlchemy 2.0, Alembic, Pydantic v2, JWT auth (python-jose), Redis + RQ for background jobs
- Database — PostgreSQL 16
- Infrastructure — Vercel (frontend), Railway (backend + Postgres + Redis)
Why I built this
I watched my own IT department roll out a new change management system and saw the gap between what vendors ship and what teams actually need. Cadence is my answer to that gap — and a deep dive into the systems-design problems that power a multi-billion-dollar category.