Buy a brick March 3 2012

Buy a brick

A couple of years ago I helped develop a fundraising application for the Child’s i Foundation, a charity and worldwide community aiming to build a home for abandoned babies in Uganda.

At the time the charity was raising money to set up a home in Kampala, so the team at Childsi came up with Buy a Brick, a web app where users donate from £2.50 to £500 to purchase a brick to build a virtual wall.

In the 2 years since it launched, the Child’s i Foundation community has bought nearly 400 bricks, raised nearly £18,000!

I implemented the backend of the application in Ruby on Rails, in particular the integration with the payment gateway for processing donations. It was the first (and only) e-commerce website that I’ve ever deployed and maintained - I learnt a lot!

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been tinkering with the application so it uses the Just Giving donations API instead of the original payment gateway. We ended up using (and patching) the Just Giving Ruby gem, so the switch over was pretty simple to implement.

What wasn’t so simple was upgrading an old, pre-Bundler Rails 2.2 application to Rails 2.3 and getting the right combination of gems versions to play together on Heroku! But I got there in the end…

The application is at buyabrick.childsifoundation.org/ and the code is all on Github: github.com/childsi/buyabrick/

The new BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra homepages October 5 2011

Last week, Radio 1 and 1Xtra launched their new homepages: - http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/ - http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/

I’ve written a “under-the-hood” post on the BBC Internet blog, describing how we approached the technical challenges to meet the editorial ambitions for the new homepage.

I was on attachment with the Radio 1 and 1Xtra Interactive team when the design was conceived, and although the site was built by the fantastic team at Kite I’ve been heavily involved throughout it’s development.

The new BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra homepages

I might be a bit biased, but I think it’s pretty special! What I’m most happy with is how we’re pushing content to the page using BBC PushFeeds (i.e. XMPP PubSub over Websockets or Flash as a fallback) to enable the live experience. On top of that, we’ve delivered an admin system that allows producers to promote content to the homepages within seconds.

The new BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra homepages

Track now playing information has been present on the BBC national radio networks sites for a number of years, but in the new homepage they are put into the spotlight. The beautiful packshots (album art) are mainly taken from the Radio 1/1Xtra charts and playlists. Using MusicBrainz identifiers we’re able to surface content from BBC Music, including artist biography, latest clips and album reviews.

The new BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra homepages

I believe this reinvents the way the stations present themselves online, and potentially on air. Whenever something happens in the studio, it’s on the website in seconds in the form of an update, photo or live video stream. The audience’s reaction to the show can be surfaced online in the form of their texts, tweets or Facebook comments.

It’s opened up a new toy box of possibilities, and I’m really looking forwards to see how both the audience and the stations engage with what we’ve built.

Young Rewired State 2011 August 25 2011

A few weeks ago I took part in Young Rewired State (YRS), a week long hack event aimed at young developers aged between 15 and 18 and focused around Open Data.

Together with Dave and Kerron, I was one of the mentors at the Young Rewired Blackfriars which was hosted at Fluxx Studios. Our group started by brainstorming during the first morning, focusing on 4/5 ideas which eventually led to 1 project: searching and visualising University course data.

The team built UniMatch:

Young Rewired State 2011

There’s a live demonstration available at http://unimatch.net/.

I was really impressed by the Fluxx Capacitors team. I loved the way they came up with ideas during the brainstorming sessions - there was some really great things coming out of it. Coding wise, there was a wide range of abilities, from those who had been programming for years (i.e. since they were 10), some of them had tinkered with some HTML and CSS and others who hadn’t coded at all but were keen to learn. The more experienced ended up doing the heavy lifting on the server side and more advanced Javascript front end work, and the rest of them worked on designing the UI and then implementing the design and HTML/CSS.

Young Rewired State 2011

There were some really ingenious approaches to working collaboratively too. When they started editing the code on a shared server space, they used a system consisting of wooden blocks for each of the components (e.g. HTML, CSS, database and server code) to prevent multiple people editing the same file at the same time.

As a mentor, it was brilliant to be able to point the more code-oriented people in the right way in terms of software development best practices such as source code control and web applications frameworks.

I wasn’t able to attend the presentation, but it’s available on the YRS UStream channel. They did a fantastic pitch (about 1h 9m mins in), and came away with the Most likely to be bought (code or concept) prize. Great work Leon, Richard, Joanne, Hugo, Kerron and Priscilla!

Some of them are continuing to work on the project, so it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.

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