Effort – Personal To-do and Project manager

Posted on May 23, 2015May 25, 2015 by Robert Starsi

I have open sourced a Rails app that I’ve been personally using for years. The code is available on Github under the MIT license. From the README:

I’ve modeled this app for my own personal use, note keeping and personal project management loosely after Basecamp. The single most important point for me is to have To-do lists that work in a particular way – that’s why I’ve build this for myself.

I am open-sourcing it to see if somebody finds it useful and can maybe build on it. Let’s see what happens.

This is a standard Rails 4 app, build the “Rails way”. Test coverage is minimal, just enough for the purposes of this app at this stage.

effiort todo lists — To-do lists – the most important and the most used part of this project.

EQAFE – Ecommerce

Posted on January 2, 2013May 30, 2015 by Robert Starsi

This is one of the first projects where I started using Rails in production. EQAFE developed—over the years—from a simple checkout page to sell a single book to an ecommerce platform featuring thousands of products, affiliate program, gifts and more.

Deliverables:

UI design and implementation.
Backend design and implementation (Rails).
Automated test suite.
~4 years running in production (DevOps).

Tour

Front page provides an index of the latest products.

A lot of the functionality is neatly tucked away in the always accessible dropdown menus.

Rails stats

eqafe-code-stats — It’s interesting to observe how each project can have quite a different allocation of the amount of code. Here for example, test vise, most of the code is located in controller tests – this tells us a lot about the app itself – a lot of the control flow is located in the controllers, most of the interesting stuff happens there, like for example users are redirected to different locations depending on their starting point and actions.

DIP Lite: E-learning Platform

Posted on October 19, 2012February 4, 2020 by Robert Starsi

DIP Lite is a free e-learning platform. Its fully automated in-browser experience connects the users with a personally assigned “buddy”: an experienced person that overviews and assist the user throughout the course. The user walks the course on her own pace as well as engage in daily exercises, complete with email notifications and communication with the course buddy provided by the course platform.

For this project I delivered the following:

Initial design of the flow and functionality of the platform based on the goals set by the client.
Mockups of the UI and user flows.
Graphic design.
Logo creation.
Implementation within Rails.
Automated test suite.
Further feature development and updating/upkeep of the codebase.
Running this project in production for 3 years (DevOps).

Tour

After the lightning fast registration users immediately start with Lesson 1.

Reviewing user's feedback. — Reviewing user’s feedback.

Rails stats

Projects Overview in 2012

Posted on August 12, 2012May 21, 2015 by Robert Starsi

These are some of the projects I’ve launched during 2012. This year was interesting as I switched from mainly using PHP as a backend language to Ruby (on Rails). Switching to Ruby was a welcome refreshment, the syntax is so close to natural language. I really enjoy the way it allows one to express the idea in code. There is little I need to say about Rails.

Here are the projects I’ve been busy with this year:

Equal Money System website redesign

Desteni I Process redesign

EQAFE – Self-Perfection Merchadise

Equal Money System Website

Posted on April 14, 2012May 22, 2015 by Robert Starsi

The goal for this project was to create a presentation which immediately engages the user and allows them to interact with the website and information in a meaningful fashion. Therefore, instead of a static presentation, we came up with easy to use and immediately available voting in relation to the goals of the project that is being presented.

Deliverables:

UIX design and its implementation within HTML & CSS.
Backend implementation in Rails, MySQL, including a fully integrated admin interface to manage the website content, votes and translations.
Custom lightweight Wiki.
Automated test suite.
Utilizing web APIs of other products of the client.
Running, maintaining & upgrading the app in production since 2012 (Unicon, Nginx, Ubuntu & Upstart).
Associated PhpBB forum.

Tour

Front page with immediately available point of interaction: voting on the projects goals.

Viewing a "goal" with voting results and visitor's feedback. — Viewing a “goal” with voting results and visitor’s feedback.

Votes are managed and responded to by moderators from the build in & easy to use interface.

The Wiki editor is custom build, features live side-by-side preview and formatting help.

Rails stats

DIP Pro – Online Course Delivery Platform

Posted on July 10, 2011February 4, 2020 by Robert Starsi

E-learning project similar to DIP Lite but for more serious and advanced students, providing much more features including credit card payments, commission payouts, file (course material) delivery, multiple different courses divided into years and months and API for integration with other projects.

Deliverables:

Initial design of the flow and functionality of the platform based on the goals set by the client.
Mockups of the UI and user flows.
Graphic design.
Logo creation.
Implementation within Rails.
Automated test suite.
Further feature development and updating/upkeep of the codebase.
Running this project in production for ~4 years (DevOps).