Jaimini calendar

What it was about

It was a digital product, sold through a webseite. I worked both as a back-end developer and designer here. Visual design was the easier part.

The main challenge here was that by the start of work, the data was nearly non-existent and was arriving slowly, so we could not just hard-code it and do everything in InDesign. I had to built a pipeline from some sort of CMS into where the astrologer was inserting the raw data, to the build step in a design application.

It looked like so:

1. The astrologer maintains and updates raw data in a Google Spreadsheet
2. That Google spreadsheet exposes acces via API
3. Once in a while I manually run a Ruby scrit on my machine
4. The script fetches the data
5. Performs some business (astro)logic on the data
6. Converts raw data from CSV (like boolean columns) into the final text wording
7. Renders HTML/CSS templates (actual month pages) using the values
8. webkit2png bulds those pages and rasterizes them into a set of PNGs
9. InDesign document has those PNGs inserted as links, they get updated
10. The InDesign document is exported as a multi-page PDF

I also built a custom landing page for this product (the other products had less complicated pages) on the website I was managing.

Also I performed some one-time webscrapping with Capybara to get some missing data.