iru

Front-End Lead, Presenter

In two weeks with two teammates, I built and publicly presented a Ruby on Rails app improving engagement between NPOs and individuals at a community level.

Pain #1

Small NPOs often face difficulties gaining continuous attention. They may receive donations relevant to their cause, but not 100% specific to their needs.


Pain #2

People with spare items, money or time to donate may not always know exactly what their donations are being used for, nor easily discover local organizations with low visibility.

The Solution

By creating a simple interface for organizations to easily manage and register their causes/goals (donations, fundraising, events) on a map, individuals can enjoy exploring their community efforts with more clarity as to what their contributions can go towards.


APIs implemented include Mapbox for the simple map interface, Cloudinary's image hosting and Stripe's payment system. We deployed iru on Heroku due to economical value and minimal-fuss features.

A couple of snapshots...

Filtering via categories

Making a donation

Instant comments

Sharing to SNS


(See it all on the full site or live presentation video!)

Challenges & Lessons Learnt

Solidifying major features and design components prior to writing code: Using prototyping tools such as Figma to plan major aspects and gather as much criticism as possible well in advance will save and prevent spending precious time used to overhaul or re-code.

Code structure and organization: We experienced the importance of clean, refactored code as implementing new features in our largest project to date corresponded with an exponential increase to hundreds of lines of code!

Let's create something together?

Whether it be a web app, or the start of a new conversation, you're welcome to reach out!