Tales of the Tatt

• Lead developer for a new niche social-networking website.
• Responsible for setting up various technologies such as an AJAX like environment, web sockets and a third party search engine (solar).

History

During my first year in college I was lucky enough to get a job working for a new startup company, Tales of the Tatt. When I first started, I was working alongside a group of developers who were building what was intended to be a new niche social networking website. As the project went on, however, it become clear that although work was progressing, the quality of the platform was getting worse instead of better. We took a risk, fired the other developers and I took over as lead dev.

The original platform was built using PHP with CodeIgniter framework. Attempts were made to extend CodeIgniter towards an ORM design; however, the project was already too deeply embedded. The website launched in early 2015, but even though people enjoyed it, it was deemed unusable. We decided to take the hit, start over and build the website on the more advanced, better-known, Ruby on Rails, framework.

For most of the summer, I worked solo, designing and developing the website from scratch. I incorporated different technologies such as web sockets, AJAX and Solr. I spent roughly 1000+ hours working on the project and although it’s not yet finished, we’re expecting to launch within the month.