Noah Kochanowicz

A Rails-based application connected to an existing PHP application. This application was created as part of ongoing freelance work with the International Society for Technology in Arthroplasty (ISTA).

The entire application was built without a framework and lacked modern security and organizational patterns that come with something like Laravel or Rails. This put data in a vulnerable position and made making changes very difficult.

With the new auth and admin portal, I salvaged the existing business logic for end users, working perfectly fine but putting it all behind a new authentication flow. The users noticed very little difference but still could use the features they were used to.

For the admins, I was able to rebuild sections of the existing admin portal page-by-page in the new system and fall back to the existing system for things I had not yet moved over. This new system allowed me to build features 3x as fast as in the old system, integrate unit and integration tests and leave the code in a cleaner state for future developers.

Strong typing has always had a special place in my heart from my brief encounters with Visual Basic and C#. Without considering performance, I wanted to challenge myself to build a DSL in Ruby to add strong typing.

Borrowing from the testing framework, RSpec, I settled on mimicking the structure of a method declaration by using blocks, with arguments passed being the method arguments.