I developed the Rails application for 2adays.com, a website that helps student athletes through the college recruiting process. My work involved replacing an existing coach and school search directory with a fully custom one. The Rails application is responsible for pulling information from a third party API for coaches and schools, and formatting the date for use in student searches and ratings. Recently, I implemented a new recurring subscription service.

Background

2adays.com is a website that helps student athletes through the college recruiting process. Current college-level athletes are able to rate their coaches through a survey-based system. These surveys are tabulated and ratings are generated for each coach. High school athletes and their parents are able to search these coaches and surveys so that they can make better choices as they enter the college athletic world.

2aDays approached me in late 2016 to build a replacement for their directory service using Rails. This application would be handed off to another developer for long term maintenance. Best practices were a deliverable.

This application best represents the work I do. My contact at 2aDays gave me loose guidelines and expectations and left me to do my best work. A little of everything I do with Rails went into this one:

  • Front end design with Bootstrap, SCSS, a splash of CoffeeScript, and good old .html.erb.
  • A healthy dose of ActiveRecord.
  • I18n. Totally worth it, even for just one language.
  • Mirroring data from an (often quirky) “REST” API.
  • Thorough testing. But not too much, you know?
  • Server setup with Vagrant.
  • Documentation. I made sure the next developer would know how to get around.
  • I was able to ship the app in 6 weeks working nights and weekends. The 2aDays team was very happy with the final result, and the developer that took over maintenance has done so with ease.

Tags: API, Automation, Billing, Consulting, Rails, Recurly, Ruby, Sidekiq