Plan to Eat Code Improvements

Overview

Plan to Eat is a meal planning website started in early 2009 by Loveland entrepreneur Clint Bounds. After being the sole developer for six years, Clint reached out to Radial in 2015. He asked for help improving his existing code base so it would be easier to maintain and scale.

Challenge

Radial’s goal was to help Clint by making the Plan to Eat codebase trustworthy. The code needed to be reliable enough that multiple developers could work on it. This needed to happen without interrupting the user experience. The code also needed to function well in a modern ecosystem so that the app could be deployed on mobile platforms in the future.

Solution

Defend: We ensured the code could defend itself. This meant redefining specifications and adding tests to support those specifications.

Upgrade: We upgraded the code from Rails 2 to Rails 3. After this, Plan to Eat was ultimately able to independently update to Rails 4. This made the app far more secure and able to use modern packages and framework features.

Refactor: We refactored the code to make the app more modular. By moving towards a domain-driven approach, it is now much easier to add new features.

API: We created an API for interacting with the application. This allowed the creation of a mobile application and future integrations with Plan to Eat.

Outcome

Plan to Eat is now a robust application that regularly gets feature updates. It has continued to gain subscribers and features. Clint no longer fears that working on the app will break the existing code. Other developers can work on the app, meaning that development time is much quicker and Clint can respond to feature requests and fix bugs more quickly. Radial built a mobile application to run against the new API, so users can now download Plan to Eat in the App Store and Google Stores.