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.