Needmore Designs is a small business based out of Portland, Oregon. We build websites for clients, as well as community sites in Ruby on Rails.

We’re looking for someone to do some updates to a public Ruby on Rails based web application. There are two primary tasks we are in need of:

1. The site was originally built in Rails 1.0, and then had the functionality of the Beast discussion forum software integrated. The user authentication system has problems, however, due to somewhat sloppy integration. For example, users cannot properly recover or change their passwords. This needs to be fixed, and tests written, so that users can manage their accounts by themselves.

2. The site has some performance problems. This may quite possibly be because of RMagick, as per-process memory usage gets very high. It also seems largely due to the code in the Beast discussion forum, which is out of date and could stand some updates. We have added caching, and it is hosted on a Solaris-based Joyent Accelerator, but it has serious problems, and after a week or so, requires a reboot. This needs to be fixed.

The current codebase consists of 1512 LOC and 1170 test LOC, the bulk of which is in the controllers and the functional tests. We have updated it to Rails 2.0 (with the occasional warning still present), but haven’t updated Beast to the latest version – although that might not be at all possible at this point.

Please contact us if you are interested in this project, and we can discuss it further!

This gig will require proficiency with Ruby on Rails, as well as likely some sysadmin and unix familiarity. We would appreciate links to some projects you have worked on in the past.