Have you helped change the world?
It’s not often that as developers we get a chance to work on projects that are truly going to change the world. Changing the Present is one of those sites. In a partnership with Arvato Systems and WellGood LLC, EdgeCase has had the chance to help build this fantastic site that is helping change the nature of gift giving.
The premise is simple but powerful: you pick the cause you want to donate money to (children, education, environment, cancer, human rights, whatever). You then browse the various gifts available. You can choose gifts ranging from small to large, each specifically targeted to give exactly what you want to give. From the website:
For just a few dollars, you can protect an acre of the rainforest or fund an hour of a cancer researcher’s time. You can provide a child with a first book, an AIDS patient with life-saving drugs or a hungry family with a nourishing meal.
Wish lists, registries and printed, personalized greeting cards make these donation gifts an attractive alternative to traditional gifts. After all, many of us just don’t need more stuff.
That’s the beauty of Changing the Present as they say:
ChangingThePresent will do for nonprofits what malls have done for shopping. And it will do for shopping something that shopping has rarely done for anyone: elevate spirits and add meaning to our lives.
Technically this has been a fun project to work on as well. The site has quite a few challenges that were interesting for the teams to overcome: large quantities of shared data, a large amount of people administering their own sections of the site, and very high traffic. Simple caching does not work. It required a whole new way of approaching the problem.
We have also been able to work very closely with Jason Hoffman of Joyent. Jason knows scalability and the issues behind it inside and out. He’s helped Changing the Present in their quest to fill the enormous traffic needs they have. He’s taught us a lot about load balancers, mongrels and deployment. kudos.
Thanks go out to Bruce Tate for introducing us to the project and Arvato for allowing us to partner with them.
