Find your next happy hour in San Diego

In the beginning of Spring 2013, I teamed up with Rodrigo Rallo, Ivan Tham, and Lester Villaspir to create a Ruby on Rails application for our advanced software engineering course project. We built BarRater, a web application to rate the different happy hours in San Diego.

Requirements

We determined that the application needed to:

• integrate with social media services
• provide a communication mechanism
• deploy using continuous integration
• be hosted on a cloud platform

With these requirements, we chose to build an application that rated the different happy hours in San Diego. Restaurant information and photos would be available by connecting to Yelp, and users could login through Facebook to rate and comment on a restaurant's happy hour.

Technologies

Our team used a lot of different technologies to develop BarRater. We wanted to deploy our application with version control and test with continous integration, so we looked to Heroku to host our application. Heroku and Codeship, a continous integration tool, handled our application testing, compiling, and deployment automatically. As a result, we could spend more time developing features, writing tests, and fixing bugs.

Results

By the end of the quarter, we had developed a prototype of BarRater that met all of our requirements. The project showed me how Ruby on Rails speeds up development through its conventions and how frequently deployed applications can benefit from continuous integration testing. It also exposed me to some of the challenges and risks of relying on a third party platform such as Yelp and Facebook. Finally, working on the project as part of a group helped improve my communication and collaboration skills.