GusLift connects student drivers with riders heading the same way. The matching itself happens over a WebSocket, which is fine when both people are staring at the app. The problem is that most of the time they aren't. Someone requests a ride, locks their phone, and the driver on the other side of campus has no idea anyone is waiting. This post walks through how push notifications were wired into GusLift across the three services that make up the product: the Expo mobile app, the Next.js backend on Cloudflare, and the matching worker (a Durable Object on Cloudflare Workers). The shape of the problem There are exactly two moments where a push notification meaningfully changes user behavior: A driver picks a rider from the waiting list. The rider needs to know to open the app and accept. The rider accepts. The driver needs to know the ride is locked in. Everything else, like seat counts updating or another driver joining the slot, is noise.…