www.precisiontext.com

Precision Text, a brand new company with only an idea, needed to hire a solid web developer to bring their new business idea to life.  After a few conversations, we both agreed that the best way to bring this idea to the marketplace would be to use the Ruby on Rails framework and a solid text messaging API.

The application allows for business owners to gather a list of their customer’s cell phone numbers. The business can then send out a message to these customers alerting them of new deals or special offers. The response rate has been high and the utility to the business has been huge.

I built the application from scratch and within a month was comfortable with a deployment in a beta stage. Using this beta deployment, the founders put the application through some of their own testing and determined they were comfortable selling the product as it was. Within a month of deployment, they had already secured 10 contracts!

TDD

This was the first app that I built in a completely test driven development (TDD) coding style. I have had some experience with unit and functional testing, but I have never actually built an application from scratch using TDD. Even though the processes was new, I still found the coding process to be much more efficient. I will be building apps using only TDD from now on.

Daemonized Processes / Time Zones

Sometimes businesses need to send messages later than when they’re at the computer. Rather than set up a complicated cron job or some other solution, I created a daemon within the application that actively listens for queued messages and sends them according to the time the end user requested.

Implicit in the scheduling is getting their time zone right. From a usability perspective, it is much easier not to do time math when queueing a job. A restaurant owner in Colorado shouldn’t have to compute the difference of her time zone to where the server is located. Neither would she want a message to accidently go out an hour early.

For usability and business rapport reasons, I implemented automatic adjustments for the time zone the user is in. To the user, it is seamless and easy to manage.

Given the budget of next to nothing and the relatively small size of the office, I decided it was best to proceed with a Linux based Samba server. Although their office is 100% Microsoft (a mix of XP and Vista machines), Linux would be a great light weight solution. The added benefit was we re-purposed an ancient workstation (circa 1996) to run the Samba server so no new hardware was purchased and we prevented another machine from polluting a land fill.

We created three shared drives for the business.

1. A share everyone in the office could access
2. A share only the executive could access
3. A share for the exclusive purpose of backing up everyone’s workstation

I simply installed Centos 5.2 distribution on the old workstation, created three distinct user accounts and group permissions, enabled the samba service, and locked down access through iptables firewall.

Creating a secure, readable, smb.conf file was really important to me. Not only for readability but also because I won’t be supporting this server after installation. Any other administrator should be able to walk into the office and quickly & clearly see how to make edits for upgrades or changes.

The smb.conf file:

#smb.conf
 
[global]
	#set up what the end user would see on their desktop
	workgroup = H4LSharedFiles
	server string = common files for H4L
 
	#general user perms
	security = user
	passdb backend = tdbsam
 
	#printing support
	load printers = no
        printing = bsd
        printcap name = /dev/null
        show add printer wizard = no
        disable spools = yes
 
[AllSharedFiles]
	comment = Files for everyone to share
	path = /sambashares/allAccess
	writeable = yes
	browseable = yes
	guest ok = yes
	write list = +allemployees
 
[Backup]
	comment = Files to back up everyone's computer
	path = /sambashares/backups
	writeable = yes
	browseable = yes
	guest ok = yes
	write list = +allemployees
 
[AdminOnly]
	comment = Access for sensitive files
	path = /sambashares/admins
	writeable = yes
	browseable = yes
	guest ok = no
	write list = +administrators

A creative design company called Old Green Pickup began its transition to using Ruby on Rails as its primary development platform. Since this was one of only a few projects Old Green Pickup had used Ruby on Rails with, the President of Old Green Pickup hired Bryce to take over the production and make sure everything was running smoothly. This is the first project in a new relationship we wish to cultivate.

I was brought in as an associate developer to the AAA project to make sure it was completed on time with high quality. I resided in Ohio for a period of three weeks to develop alongside the lead developer.

During that time, I helped with formalizing the architectural plan of the application, offered assistance in deployment and led development projects for several areas of the application.

One fundamental role in the project was to create an online market place and integrate it with an existing SQL Server database. I also created a robust shopping cart and checkout procedure. I also built a web service to manage users in the shopping cart.

The main application was build using a Flash frontend and required data called from the Rails backend. I built a background RESTful interface and helped the lead designer integrate it with Flash.

Integration with other AAA services was also required. I built the front end code to a GIS service, a system for sending emails, and a mechanism to create, store and display unique travel products.

I returned home and continued working on the project through their successful launch in early May of 2008.

Its programming includes an interface to build medical surveys and host a variety of physician specific questionnaires. It resembles a SurveyMonkey like solution specifically tailored to the security and confidentiality concerns of the medical profession.

I developed all the code including user management and payment processing.

A “Web 2.0″ application designed as an all in one solution for medical research.

Physicians can design studies, write surveys and collaborate with peers. A unique challenge with this project was patient confidentiality. I built a secure system focused on patient anonymity.

The project also required a regular, non-intrusive, payment processing mechanism which I implemented.

A community area allows physicians to discuss emerging research and develop new studies. Includes a regularly updated blog.