Internal portal redesign*
* Real name obfuscated because of an NDA
Started in as a part of my work as Ruby developer, UI designer and tech lead for Speed & Function
Business role
The app was one of the company’s SasS products — an external admin dashboard for the data collected by inspectors who measure water gauges and related infrastucture.
What it was about
The company was the leading provider of devices and services related to monitoring water and gas devices: flow control, quality, remote observability etc.
The web app was a classic but massive and old Rails codebase running on Ruby v 2.5.3 with (current Ruby was 3.1.2). Our main goal here was to build new front-end layouts according to the design comps from a web design agency, and upgrade the dependencies.
Challenges
Our main goal here was to incorporate front-end layouts with new design, and we had front-enders who were unfamiliar with Ruby on Rails. I decided that Rails was enough novice-friendly and taught them enough Rails so that they could work directly in the views. We also had Slim template engine that resembled Jade which they were familiar with, so it was a success.
My responsibilities
On this project I acted as a tech lead and a back-end developer, working alongside another back-end dev and 2 front-end engineers.
- Adding responsiveness to legacy pages
- Creating risk management assessment documents
- Estimating large projects
- Fine-tuning web typography
- Front-end develpment (HTML / CSS /JS)
- Making heavy parts of web pages asyncronous via Ajax
- Participation in creating project roadmaps
- Refactoring legacy code
- Reviewing pull requests
- Setting tasks for team developers
- Upgrading gems in legacy Rails projects
- Writing internal documentation and tech manuals
- Writing unit tests with RSpec
Interesting things I did on this project
- Rewriting clumsy legacy HTML into correct, consise, semantic HTML that looks beautiful even with no CSS
- Rewriting controllers to reduce the number of SQL queries & lower DB utilization