SugarStats.com Launches - Simple Blood Sugar Tracking for Diabetes built with Ruby on Rails
Posted on June 21, 2007
4 Comments
Good news, we’ve launched!! After months of development and BETA testing we’re letting it loose. Tell you the truth had we had more resources we would have launched much soon 
But hey, there is no better time than now.
With 194 million people worldwide and 21 million in the U.S. alone coping with diabetes daily, hopefully we can help make a difference and utilize all this great technology at our disposal to help keep things under control.
Check out our shiny press release
SugarStats.com, What is it?
I guess I can’t get much clearer than our home page:
SugarStats makes it simple to track, monitor and share your blood glucose levels online for better diabetes management
We’ve been getting tremendous support and feedback from BETA testers. I’ve been hearing about peoples blood sugar averages dropping a full 10% in only a few weeks of tracking. I know from my personal use that over the last few months my blood sugar averages have dropped over 30%!
Technical Setup
In the spirit of transparency I thought I’d share a little bit about our tech stack and how we developed SugarStats.
I specs and prototyped the entire app myself for the first 6 months until we could hire some developers. We’ve built the whole thing off CRUD/REST of course and sprinking Ajax/RJS in just the right places. Capistrano and RSpec are must and I have to say have been great to work with. I could never get much into TDD, I guess BDD was a little easier for me to digest.
Rails Stack
I actually started this as a personal project (I’m a 15 year Type-1 Diabetic) and learned Rails from scratch do to do. We’re using pretty standard stuff:
- Rails 1.2.3
- Ruby 1.8.5
- Capistrano
- RSpec
- Development mainly on Macs using Textmate/RadRails and Mongrel/MySQL
Rails Plugins
Putting it together we used quite a few nice plugins:
- Gruff Graphs (Thanks Geoffery!)
- tzinfo
- responds_to
- sparklines
- ssl_requirement
- state_select
- restful_authentication (Which I’d recommend, great auth system built off AAA)
- railspdf
- mocha
- innodb_migrations
- google_analytics
- flex_image
- 12_hour_time_select
- active_form
- active_scaffold (Excellent plugin)
- enkoder
- TrustCommerce_Subscriptions (Our gateway of choice)
- annotate_modles (A must have)
- acts_as_attachment (Tried and True)
- exception_notification (Another must have)
Ruby Gems
Of course we’re using:
- Rails Gem
- Capistrano
- RedCloth
- diff-ics
- mocha
- money
- gruff
- hoe
- fastercsv (excellent)
- pdf-writer
- termios (pretty handy)
- rmagick
- rspec (who isn’t writing specs these days?)
- trustcommerce (our gateway of choice)
- tzinfo
Server Setup
I looooooove virtualization, I must admit. I just see no reason NOT to use it, even if you had dedicated servers. We went with the EXCELLENT VPS experts over at www.slicehost.com, their performance/pricing was unbeatable. They are based on Xen and provided some very good benefits for us.
We have a few 512 and 1GB slices (They offer 256MB/512MB/1GB slices, 2/4GB coming in the future I hear) with them. The great thing is we can scale either vertically or horizontally within a few minutes! New “slices” are provisioned in minutes or you could also just upgrade current slices to a higher plan with more resources. This works out quite nicely for us.
We’re running:
- LiteSpeed 3.1 (Nginx + Mongrel_Cluster is also great and just as fast. LS just included everything in a dead-simple package with a pretty web UI to boot
) - Ruyb-LSAPI for Rails processing (Very fast, uses very little RAM)
- Ubuntu Server
- MySQL
- Munin/Monit for Monitoring
- Montastic for external site monitoring
It has been an awesome ride and I don’t think I could have done it without Rails, it just made things a pleasure to do.
.
Posted on June 21, 2007
Filed Under Analytics, Business, CSS/XHTML, Daily Thoughts, Design, General, Hardware, Hosting, Marketing, Productivity, Ranting, Ruby on Rails, SEO, Startup, SugarStats, Tech, Web
Quote: Cultivating Simplicity
Posted on June 18, 2007
Leave a Comment
“One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.”
—Bruce Lee
.
Posted on June 18, 2007
Filed Under Art & Design, Daily Thoughts, Quotes, Ranting
The iPhone’s Web App SDK
Posted on June 14, 2007
Leave a Comment
I think this a great idea. I know many other developers out there aren’t very happy but this opens up a lot of potential and just pushes web standards out there much more.
People seem to have a lot of questions with what you can do with the “Web App SDK” and how it will run. I’m hearing things like “Well that sucks, it must be somehow limited”.
From the looks of it this isn’t the case at all. Though I have to digg deeper into it, it will somewhat represent how a regular web server works in that it will basically be run locally on you iPhone and ALSO be viewed from the iPhone Safari browser. So maybe it will work similar to a regular Client/Server Configuration. If this isn’t the case please correct me, if so thats pretty cool if you ask me.
As long as it can integrate with the rest of the phone, calling features and internet services it should rock. We’ll see how that keyboard works out too 
.
Posted on June 14, 2007
Filed Under Apple, Business, CSS/XHTML, Daily Thoughts, Design, General, Hardware, Mobile Tech, Ranting, Tech, Web
-
Projects
-
Search it all
-
About
I'm Marston and here you'll find my rantings, rhetoric and other useful info. I dig tech, photography, quantum physics and organic food. I'm the founder of SugarStats.com and thats my days developing.
-
Flickr
www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from Marston A.. Make your own badge here.
-
Twitter
- Off to the airport for Cape Verde. 1 month. No Internet. No computer. No phone. Shocking right? I cant wait. See ya later ;) 17 hrs ago
- @brunofigueiredo oh yeah :-). Highly recommended. 1 day ago
- Suitcase packed. Now off to see Dark Night in IMAX before tomorrows flight to Cabo 1 day ago
- Trying to find Dark Night IMAX tickets for Wednesday night before we flight to Cabo Verde. Crossing my fingers... Must. See. In. IMAX. 4 days ago
- Watching "Young People F***ing". Freakin hilarious. 5 days ago
- @mbalara Oh yeah? Where to? 5 days ago
- @Reinier Off to coolhaven again? 5 days ago
- Looking at web conf apps like WebEx, DimDim and GoToMeeting. Any suggestions or other recommendations? 5 days ago
- More updates...