building a charity web app in 24 hours

Mike Bailey

Melbourne hottest ever daySat 7 Feb 2009

Sat 7 Feb 2009

Sat 7 Feb 2009

Sat 7 Feb 2009

Tue 10 Feb 2009

The phone call

Sat 14 Feb 2009

fun4paws had >10,000 emails in their inbox

Requirements

• respond to >10,000 emails

• collect info from volunteers

• make volunteer info searchable

grep --no-filename --max-count=1 '^From: ' * | \sort | uniq > mail_list.txt

Extract list of unique senders from mailboxes:

... 4619 unique addresses

Mon 16 Feb 2009

Mon 16 Feb 2009

Mon 16 Feb 2009

Thu 19 Feb 2009

Fri 20 Feb 2009

Fri 20 Feb 2009

Domain name $10

Virtual Private Server $20

Mailout $50

15 min

5 min

60 min

$80 75 min

Services required are cheap and quick to provision...

Total

Linux operating system

Software required was all free and open source...

Ruby programming language

Ruby on Rails web framework

Software library for easier map-based apps

Outcomes

30 dogs in foster care

7 dogs adopted

... less than anticipated but still a good result

Outcomes

further mailout to volunteers resulted in donations of:

- kennels- dog beds- dog coats- other items

which have been distributed to people in need.

Outcomes

Thanks to Pete Yandell pete@notahat.com for help

Source lives at git://github.com/notahat/fun4paws.git