Christian Fingerhuth

The charity organization implemented a Django-based medical record software, initially developed in Ruby on Rails. Despite its size, the software has been operational for 18 years with minimal maintenance required. The transition between Ruby on Rails and Django was seamless, allowing different developers to modify the code efficiently. The success of this project demonstrates the benefits of a well-organized approach, where clean code follows the framework's standards. The software is easily managed and maintained due to its streamlined structure.

This software is designed for web scraping eCommerce sites to extract pricing and stock availability data. Two significant challenges were encountered during the development process.

The first challenge was related to developing a script that could efficiently extract the required data while overcoming attempts by some websites to block scraping. Various strategies, including requests, APIs, or Selenium, were employed to overcome this challenge.

The second challenge was adequately managing the scraped data. The data had to be classified, and redundant data had to be removed. Additionally, the software needed to monitor the status of all scraping scripts to ensure they ran correctly. To accomplish this, we addressed the following questions regarding the software:
• Are missing slots due to product unavailability or website layout changes?
• Is the new product a new release or a new version of an existing product?

For the past seven years, I led the project and worked as its primary developer for an external client. The project initially started as a small form to register incoming requests and has since grown into a comprehensive suite with multiple modules, including logistics, scheduling, interoperating modules with other software, access to external clients, mobile version, pricing and contracts, data warehouse, dashboard, alerts, and monitoring, as well as predictive analysis.

The primary challenge was to start with a small, simple version that could eventually transform into a full-scale suite while properly managing the database design. The project encountered multiple changes to the software requirements by the client, necessitating a well-designed transition process.

The initial version employed the Django template as a front end but later migrated to Angular and Vue, which presented some difficulties and challenges. However, the team successfully managed the transition and ensured uninterrupted software operations.

While I wrote most of the code, several other professionals worked collaboratively with the client to deliver this project.