Description

This handled inventory and licensing for liquor stores regulated by North Carolina. Part of the project was to rewrite this Rails 2 app in Rails 6. The rest of the project was to handle tickets created by Dalcom's help desk. Since the app was so old, it broke all the time for reasons that weren't exactly clear. It also had to take readings from handheld inventory scanners, which had their own quirks to deal with. Everything had to go through Microsoft Navision.

The app generated labels, reordered stock that was low, resolved stock and reported to North Carolina regulatory agencies. It was a mult-tenant app so each of the 35 versions had small differences among them.

The biggest challenge

Rewriting the app into the contemporary version of Rails was great fun, but the app was on its last legs. Predicting breaks on the running program was nearly impossible, and made harder by Dalcom's choice to not let me access server logs due to legal concerns, so I could not see explicitly which calls were breaking which parts.