NPR Live Sessions (formerly known as VuHaus) is a non-profit, digital music video service that introduces emerging and established artists to new audiences. By creating exposure for these acts, Live Sessions provides a unique window into the country’s most vibrant music scenes.

The Live Sessions backend was built with Ruby on Rails. The project consisted of a bespoke content management system, a fully documented and versioned API, video encoding and transcoding, a search engine and a basic recommendation engine.

A robust content administration area was created to allow management personnel and station representatives to add and update content for artists, videos, live performances, playlists and site features.

An API was also created, which provides data to the website and mobile app. HTTP caching is delegated to Fastly, which helps greatly reduce traffic on the Heroku app, keeping page responses quick and application costs down. Optimized image delivery is achieved with Imgix.

Search engine behavior is provided with an Elasticsearch integration, and usage statistics are sent to Keen.io for subsequent report generation.

World Science U is a platform for online education, dedicated to teaching science to learners old and young. Through videos and animations, demonstrations, discussions, augmenting traditional instructional techniques with the benefits of digital technology, World Science U aims to bring real, in-depth scientific understanding to everyone, whether a novice or an expert.

The WSU courseware application was built entirely in Ruby on Rails, and consists of college-level instruction on a large variety of science-related topics to students of any skill level.

Each course has lectures, question and answer sessions with video explanations, office hours, short quizzes and interactive animations. Students can track and save their progress, and resume sessions for the short, and university-level, classes.

TED-Ed is TED’s youth and education initiative. TED-Ed’s mission is to spark and celebrate the ideas of teachers and students around the world.

The project was built in Ruby on Rails, and development consisted of a robust content management system for both lesson creators and administrators. Teachers can create their own interactive lessons, allowing students around the world to bring TED into their own classrooms. With a global network of over 250,000 teachers, the site receives over a million views per week and advances TED’s goal of changing attitudes, lives, and the world, using the power of ideas.

Splice Today is an online magazine, whose emphasis is weighted toward politics and the arts, music, film and books, annd also includes essays and interviews about sports and the nuances of today’s popular culture.

The project began in 2007, and was built in Ruby on Rails (when Rails was just v1.8!), and consisted of a bespoke content management system, a search engine, threaded user commenting, and user-generated logos. Maintenance and new feature work on the site continues to the present.