Michael Zhou

I created and launched Cary Chinese School Online Registration system during my spare time to replace the School's old pencil-paper system.

The webapp is built upon many open source technologies: the great Ruby on Rails MVC framework, many wonderful gems (Devise for authentication, Cancan for authorization, Haml for presentation to name a few), the sleek/modern Bootstrap front-end framework and jQuery library. I chose Postgres as the backend database because that is the DB Heroku (our… Show more

I created and launched Cary Chinese School Online Registration system during my spare time to replace the School's old pencil-paper system.

The webapp is built upon many open source technologies: the great Ruby on Rails MVC framework, many wonderful gems (Devise for authentication, Cancan for authorization, Haml for presentation to name a few), the sleek/modern Bootstrap front-end framework and jQuery library. I chose Postgres as the backend database because that is the DB Heroku (our website host) favors but it can be switched to any relational SQL databases.

The webapp was officially deployed and launched at Heroku.com in April 2013 and extensively used by the parents and staff at the Cary Chinese School since then. It runs on Thin web server.

The source code is managed by Git, whose remote repository is located at Bitbucket.org. I developed the application on my Ubuntu Linux system, a virtual machine running on top of Oracle VirtualBox (on Windows). Show less

It's a continuation of the same project as LinkedIn does not allow more than 2000 characters in the description.

From user experience point of view, we aim at navigating a parent, without any online or in-person help, through the process of entering family contact info, parent and student info, as well as completing registrations for their children and/or themselves. We do not assume all parents are tech or computer savvy, so we iteratively fine tuned the interface to make it intuitive… Show more

It's a continuation of the same project as LinkedIn does not allow more than 2000 characters in the description.

From user experience point of view, we aim at navigating a parent, without any online or in-person help, through the process of entering family contact info, parent and student info, as well as completing registrations for their children and/or themselves. We do not assume all parents are tech or computer savvy, so we iteratively fine tuned the interface to make it intuitive and fool-proof. I attributed the good result to following the gist of Agile development process in which we quickly develop and launch a prototype, collect user feedback during test-run, and fine-tune when needed.

From technology point of view, I took a deep dive into the Rails framework, perusing online resources like RailsCast and StackOverflow when hitting tumbling blocks. What makes me feel good is that now I can give back to the online community and help others in need by answering questions after working intensively with these tools, such as Devise and Cancan.

From software development process point of view, I gained quite a bit of experience by following the Agile process. I set up my Ubuntu Linux development box, installed and configured all the needed tools, documented the entire process and gotchas on wiki, deployed on Heroku.com. I also get into the habit of checking logs and backing up databases on a daily basis. If it were not for cost, I would rather prefer setting up a backup schedule to let the system do that without my supervision.

There is a lot to be done for the project and I can think them through during the summer.

Number 1 on the list is integration with Redis. It should improve performance though this hasn't been a problem and won't be in the near future. I'd also like to integrate Backbone (or Spine) to our front-end to further improve our user experience. Other enhancements include logging and auditing to help troubleshoot when things go awry. Show less