A simple and beautiful todo list web application built with Ruby on Rails 4.

Check out the live demo!

The main idea behind Butler was to create a "Hello World" like rather simple web application to get me started with Ruby on Rails, but focusing on doing all from design to development. Its goal was to create something that looks good and professional, with user friendly interface and design that I could use for my personal portfolio that is yet to come.

Started out with general planning phase where I tried to gather as much ideas as possible on what I wanted to achieve, as well as what is involved and needs to be done in order to do meet the goals. This involved things like gathering requirements, looking up some reference sites, coming up with rough class diagrams etc.. For this, I used Trello to help me keep things organized and track the progress.

Once I came up with the deliverables and goals for the project, I moved to design phase, breaking things down to userflow diagrams, low, mid, and high fidelity wireframes, upto creating some core pages mock ups in Photoshop to get the overall look and feel and color schemes down. For this project, I decided to go with the flat design minimalistic look, keeping things simple and concise as much as possible.

Since Butler had fairly simple functional requirements there weren't much implementation work involved for this particular project. Hence, instead of doing Test First or TDD, I basically came up with some class diagrams, implemented each object's CRUD and views, and tested pages as I go. During the initial development phase, the deliverables I set were bare minimum working pages (no ajaxified forms, flash messages, etc.) and then later as I re-iterated through the dev phases multiple times, new functionalities got added one by one, such as creating new todo item asyncronously using ajax for better usability.

After going through a few different cycles of development phase, the app was finally deployed to Heroku.

Check out the live demo!

Butler is powered by:

• Ruby 2.2.1
• Rails 4.2.0
• CSS3
• HTML5
• jQuery/CoffeeScript
• Mandrill (Transactional email service/platform)
• Heroku

With help of these awesome gems:

• Devise
• Bourbon
• Font Awesome
• FriendlyId

©2015 Jin Pae.