youthinsight.net is the product web site for a family of SaaS applications which are used by state and county government to aggregate data for children over which the government has stewardship (e.g. foster youth, at-risk youth, etc).
the project
Youth Insight has three components: the public web site about the product, the private-access SaaS web application product, and the proprietary backend data aggregation engine which prepares data for access through the SaaS application. Ultimately, the purpose of the SaaS applications are to help social workers and educators provide suitable care and education. By having current and historical information available together, care providers spend far less time gathering information, and are able to make more timely and suitable decisions on behalf of the kids.
my role
I designed and wrote the public site, design and develop the SaaS application, and do the programming for the backend aggregation engine. This project has been in action since 2003, and continues to evolve with smarter technology, and more effective tools for users.
data aggregation
This is where the bulk of the magic is. Youth Insight collects data from a number of agencies, school districts, and other sources within a client county. The tricky part is that this data is in a variety of unnormalized formats and there is no unique or even natural id which connects these sources. We have to do some fancy footwork to match records to a specific youth. There's also a ton of field level transformations to clean up the data. To describe the rules for transformations, indexing, and other factors we created a domain-specific language (“DSL”) which simplifies the task and makes it extremly easy to adapt to changes even after setup (which happen often). There's a lot of other nifty programming in the aggregator which is written primarily in Ruby.
security and privacy
You can imagine the sensitivity and scrutiny that security and privacy issues would raise for an application like this. These are areas I have paid close attention to for about 10 years now. From writing in a defensive programming style for security to granular user permission controls for privacy, a lot of care and refinement have gone into these areas.
