Introducing dived.in

Well 12 weeks went very fast, but I'm thrilled to say I've finished the GA WDI program and for my final project completed dived.in.

Dived.in is a social network for scuba divers built by… well me an ex-scuba diver instructor. The aim was simple, connect divers and locations together in one place, and of course from a technical point of view build a kick-ass rails application in the process.

The site was built using BDD, an important technique to creating scalable web apps and uses Postgres DB on the back. I originally intended to build the whole site as an Ember application fed by a JSON api, however with Ember not quite launched yet and lots of obstacles to conquer with authentication, authorisation and other caveats, I decided to keep it simple, well simple-ish.

The site takes advantage of the turbolinks gem which dramatically improves performance on the front end. I also wrote some custom ajax calls and worked hard on optimising the all code to keep it snappy. By using icon fonts the site remains fast while looking pretty good on retina screens. Given that this was a 3 week project there is still a lot more that I want to do to improve it further, but so far it has been great to see and hear other peoples reactions to the site. Let me know what you think on twitter or sign up to the dived.in Facebook page."