VIA

VIA is a new start-up making revolutionary steps forward in the web-to-print and communications spaces. I worked full-time for VIA for several months and have formed a strong partnership as a freelancer. I built a beta version of their system from the ground-up. This was a highly complex project involving several programming languages and months of work and innovation.

The base of VIA, which handles user authentication and account management (as well as the admin panel), is a custom built Ruby on Rails application. We chose Rails because of its excellent community, abundance of developers and innovative, forward-thinking development strategy.

The most impressive technology in VIA is an interactive booklet engine with desktop publishing editor capabilities. I decided to write this entire system in CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript gave us the power and convenience of JavaScript - wide support and no plugins - alongside the sleekness and developer friendliness of Ruby.

Once the user has created their documents, they need to print and share them in a friendly file format. VIA contains a powerful PDF generation engine written from the ground-up to provide pixel perfect, speedy PDF generation.

Responsibilities

Full stack web development
Devops and sysadmin tasks
Architecture and design
Internal Systems Development

The Lowdown

Working at VIA was an enriching and empowering time of my life, and I thoroughly enjoyed helping create a fantastic product with some fantastic people. I was an integral part of the team and am still involved with the company on a freelance basis.