Social Media Site for Recycling

Client
Technology
Social Media für Recycling

The system was integrated through webservices with various outside providers.  

There are also pro-blogs and videos, and professional partner pages, as well as a sub-site called "Scan At School" that encourages school children to recycle, and schools are awarded prizes.

The difference to thinkgreenrewards was that this site also had a lot of social media (blogs, videos), and encouraged kiosk based recycling, whereas thinkgreenreward encouraged street-side pickup. Maybe more deciding, both sides had different internal business units running them.

  • Worked on remote virtual team;  agile development:
  • This site was huge:  it included up to 250 Drupal modules and had a user base of over 100,000.  The database was enormous, and the site needed extensive performance enhancement measures, including special caching mechanisms using memechache and varnish.
  • Lots of support work: add new features in code, fix bugs.
  • Site was originally merged with ‘thinkgreenrewards.com’ (see above) and then split off.
  • A Recycle Group Contest with leaderboard, organic groups, and an organizational structure done with taxonomy.
  • Security Audit (whitehat); fixed various security holes.
  • I implemented several subsystems with different user behavior.
  • Implemented a complicated enterprise password policy.
  • Many updates to particular functionality and the look of various site items.
  • A complete re-theme for greenopolis.com, which ended up not getting used after all.

The development was done similar to SCRUM, where timed production release cycles were planned by choosing various tickets from a backlog in a Trac system. For each release, there was a development phase, followed by a strict QA cycle. The system was version controlled using Git and Jenkins, and I designed a clean branching strategy. All developers were virtual on the team. Communication was done using ongoing chat (IRC), email, and live document sharing using Google docs and other digital tools.