Hackergal Hub
Teaching Canadian girls to code.
Overview
Hackergal is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to inspiring Canadian girls to code.
In addition to offering Hackathons and curriculum, Hackergal has also developed a custom learning portal to deliver educational materials and showcase the work of participants. This portal is known as the Hackergal Hub. The Hub is a Ruby on Rails and React application.
Through the hustle and bustle of running a busy organization, the Hub found itself in need of some modernization and simplification. In addition, the growth and success of the Hackergal organization also led to the need of additional features and reporting insights to support participant success and grant applications.
This is where Harled entered the picture. We're dedicated to getting the Hub caught up to the latest version of
Ruby, Ruby on Rails and gem dependencies. We're also excited to help simplify the platform and position it for the
next partnership who is able to build all of the great features that Hackergal needs to continue the important mission
of enabling Canadian girls to
Technology
The Hub is a great project that has been designed and developed by a handful of talented individuals. However, the state of the community is always evolving and some of the original stack decisions have become less common and have introduced substantial complexity in supporting the platform.
Our first order of business was to Dockerize the application for an enhanced Developer Experience (DX). This involves leveraging Docker, Docker Compose and VS Code containers to create a consistent development environment that can be setup in minutes.
The second order of business has been to upgrade core stack components including Ruby (2.7 to 3.2), and Ruby on Rails (6.0 to 7.1). This task naturally led to the investment in refactoring test cases as well as the development of additional test cases to assure an acceptable level of coverage and test performance.
Next up we'll be looking to upgrade ruby gem dependencies. If time permits, we would also like to simplify the platform by removing some less "Rails-y" options including HAML and converting React components back to native ERB files.
Gratitude
We are thankful to the executive team at Hackergal for the opportunity to partner with them and to play a small role in advancing the agenda of helping Canadian girls to code.
The team has been incredibly gracious with their time to dig into deep technical issues and to continue to evolve the positioning of the Hub within their portfolio.
What we're working on
We focus on a few, very special clients at a time. Below you can see the projects we currently have on the go.
