Technology for Resource Mint

We never talked about the technology we are developing Resrouce Mint in. Here goes…

We started with Ruby on Rails and MySQL, with loads and loads of Javascripts and cross-browser compatible tableless CSS. Having learnt a lot and about 20 man-days later we’re junking the CSS, Javascript/AJAX approach and switching to Flex (call it learning while building a product).

So now we are testing out Adobe Flex 2.

We almost also junked Ruby on Rails for JRuby and later Java, but I guess changed our minds to launch this version in Rails and Flex, learn from the experience and then at some later stage change the codebase, if need be.

More details to be posted by my colleagues.

What is Resource Mint?

We love Basecamp project collaboration tool! It has helped us improve our Project Communication with our customers. Our customers love it too.

However, Basecamp has not solved the issue of internal project and resource management. After experimenting with several open source tools, and various versions of spreadsheets, we decided to write our own tool, using Basecamp.

PRIMARY CHALLENGE

In an environment where we have several small (websites or TYPO3 extension writing) projects open on Basecamp and a limited number of developers working on them, we have to have developers shuffle between projects often, depending upon customer responses, and other holdups.

In such a situation, we need to commit to customers as to when we will get back to them with firm estimates of their requirements or when do we have the next developer free to start working on a project.

Our biggest problem with Basecamp was that To-Dos do not have Completion Dates and Hours Estimates.

ENTER RESOURCE MINT

To solve this challenge, are designing a system to help our internal project and resource management. Here are some of the features of the product under development for Phase-I :

1. Enter Estimated Completion Date against each To-Do
2. Built-in alerts on To-Do dates exceeding Milestone dates
3. Enter estimated hours against each To-Do
4. Re-organise To-Do allocation among individuals and compare the occupancy status