Case study
Research team by exploring numerous individuals, families and single mothers, collected and processed an impressive set of data organised by various parameters and factors in multiple dimensions.
In the middle of 2022, Sonder Collective made a decision that the results and learnings of this wide-scale extensive research are ready and can be made publicly available. The first thought was - let’s create a web service available to anyone around the world. One basic requirement was to make each household data segment easy to explore and able to compare various segments to confront differences by categories like health outcomes: reproductive health, pregnancy, child health, nutrition or various vulnerabilities: individual, household, community, and healthcare.
Technologies used:
Result:
SCOPE OF WORK
Pathways is a project different from any other as it has a huge social impact and touches personal health and family aspects across different countries and social origins
The project aims to make health outcomes and their segmentation visible. Pathways is a platform with knowledge from the research and learning about health, family aspects, women’s well-being and their families. At the heart of Pathways is a desire to understand the nuanced factors that constitute the socio-economic, environmental, and cultural vulnerability of women and their children to poor health. We have created a platform that allows you to view and compare these multidimensional sets of data.
Services we did for them:
1. Research:
This stage consisted in doing research, understanding the product and choosing the technology in the context of the platform maintenance costs as well as the ease and speed of backend implementation. The fontend had to be custom to reflect the design, specially prepared for it to be able to clearly show this data.
2. Design and development:
Close collaboration with the international design team to find out the best UX using our knowledge from our practice and know-how. As a result of this cooperation we have created a dedicated design system in Figma.
3. Implementation:
- Headless Strapi CMS structure as a data source provider for Angular frontend application
- Angular frontend application with a requirement to be open for a future switch to any custom-written backend service
- Heroku setup including Gitlab CI/CD as a cloud infrastructure provider
- Piwik.pro integration for analytics
- To protect the website from a e.g. DDoS attack we have added CloudFlare in the front of the service
Where it works:
Project development
01
First step
Our first task was to find out a solution, a technology that will be flexible enough to, in a relatively easy way, create data structure provided by researchers and at the same time should be easy to populate and moderate content by the same people. Another constraint that we had to face was tight dev time and budget. Combining these basic requirements we decided to go with headless CMS. Headless CMS provides lots of advantages: easy-to-use UI for non-tech people, flexibility in customisation of data structure, and ease to set up and deploy instances.
02
Second step
As the project has huge potential to evaluate and grow we decided to design and develop a frontend application using a complete custom approach with Angular. We designed and implemented an Angular application with a mandatory requirement to be open for any further backend service integration. Why is that? As headless CMS is good enough at this phase and covers all our features, in the short future this may change. We wanted to be sure that we would be open to developing a new backend service. It might be a completely custom one that will be easy to integrate with the frontend Angular app.
03
Third step
The last piece left to make the solution live and publicly available was the infrastructure. Pathways project was at this moment informational application where visitors can compare segments, without for example UIM (User Identity Management) or other sophisticated data processing that requires dedicated solutions. Taking all these requirements including the cost of running, we decided that the most accurate cloud provider is Heroku. Thus with a few lines of Terraform IaaC and Gitlab CI/CD, we have created a complete pipeline and cloud infrastructure that host our Pathways project.
04
Fourth step
As security is important obviously at the very front side, under the hood we have used CloudFlare. It is a service that in basic form provides numerous protections like a DDoS out of the box, free of charge. We strongly recommend using the CloudFlare solution as a basic protection wall if you still do not use it. Our goal and intention are to create a reliable and secure solution, which is why we maintain the platform and update any security lacks.
Challenges to overcome
What our client says
Melanie Wendland
Our specialists in the project:
Back-End Developer
Krzysztof Kura
Front-End Developer
Wojciech Jakubek
Front-End Developer
Hubert Wróblewski
Quality Assurance
Wojciech Błądek
Project in numbers
6
people involved in the project
2
available in 2 countries
5
technologies used
6
months duration of the project
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