In this episode, we're diving into the process of building up employee availability and generating bookable time slots for a service. We'll start by looking at how we define employee schedules — including start and end dates (which could span months or even a year), specific days of the week and hours the employee works, and dates they’re completely unavailable. This way, instead of tediously updating their schedule week by week, we handle it in one go.

Next up, we'll introduce the concept of exclusions. These are specific days the employee can’t work, even if they're generally available. Then, as we start building the slot system, we take into account these schedules, exclusions, and also any already-booked appointments. This helps us know not only when the employee could work, but also which time slots are definitely off the table because they've already been booked.

To generate the actual availability slots, we'll build a collection of possible time intervals (like every 30 minutes) over the desired period. We filter these slots based on who’s available, for how long, and which services they can offer. If more than one employee can handle a slot, we include that info so the user can either pick the specific person or just choose a service slot regardless of who does it.

We'll also see how this works not just for a single day, but over larger periods like a week or even months. By the end, you'll have a clearer idea of how all the moving pieces work together to display available slots to a user — nice and fast, even if the logic is a bit complex behind the scenes. Don't worry if it's a lot to take in now; as we start coding it together, everything will click!