I make things that run on the web (mostly).
More ABOUT me
and my PROJECTS.
Platform for conducting 360° evaluation for lecturers
| Usage | Longevity | Contract value |
|---|---|---|
|
600k+ assessments by 50k+ users |
Used continuously for 6 years |
6 figures originally 7 figures in enhancements |
EVAL is used by the client to preform lecturer evaluations for their entire staff. It's used to support compensation and career track decisions.
Originally a 6 figure experiment delivered in blistering 7 weeks became a multi-year project that resulted in 7 figures of enhancements and an on-going relationship with the client.
Rails integrated with on-premise LDAP, running on nginx with MySQL. Vanilla JS with Google Charts. Axlsx and wkhtmltopdf for export. Custom historical report generation structure. Automated ETL process with existing systems.
It's used by the entire teaching staff and all students periodically near the end of semesters. Over the past 6 years over 600k assessments have been conducted by 50k different users.
Update two years later: In the two years since this was made (and this post written)there have been no issues related to the login. Both the database and the LDAP logins stillwo... (1944)
The project also has extremely comprehensive reporting with 14 different templates each supporting several filters such as subject or school. All reports are also exportable to XLSX (including graphs such as in the screenshot) and in PDF (also including graphs).
Preventative and remedial maintenance are minimal and are brief twice-yearly checks. Maintenance is mostly taken care of using automated scripts that do things such as log file rotation, cleaning up orphaned users or assessments and removing no longer needed files.
There are 25 different automated emails that trigger periodically. The content can be edited and simple MailChimp-style merge tags are supported to include info such as recipient name or subject dates, etc.
The platform integrates with several other internal systems by ingesting automatically generated files. Internal systems generate files and EVAL runs ETL to pull in information about the lecturer-subject-student relationship.
The integration supports CSV files with tens of thousands of records and runs on a daily basis. It’s got comprehensive logging and is extremely resilient – a failure in one row does not lead to the entire process halting but does prevent other related data from being loaded.
The platform has stood the test of time and is being continuously upgraded. No significant down-time has been recorded.
By all standards this can be regarded as a successful software project: it’s profitable for the company, it’s useful for the client so much so that it’s continuously being added to and the relationship with the client is strong.