Admin Your Appor Why Internal Tools Matter

Hi. I’m Mike. (Michael Sean Becker)

Content Engineering

I’d like to tell you a story

2012

Initial Build

• Rails for backend and frontend

• Active Admin

Then RailsConf 2012 Happened

The Ecosystem

• Smaller systems that talk to each other

• API Endpoints that served both Web and Mobile

• and…..

• Active Admin in the same spot as before

We modified our architecture, but didn’t update how we dealt with internal tools.

• Admin wasn’t updated

• Content creators were blocked

• Engineers had to begin updating content

That brings us to 2014

Principles

• API driven

• Testable

• Trackable

• Administrable

Our new goals

• Internal users deserve good tools

• Treat our data as content and not rows in a spreadsheet

• Admin tools need to be easy to add to and extend by other developers

Internal Products and Tools can be as important as the ones you build for your customers

The Plan

• Small, reusable libraries for common functionality

• Done with Ember Components when possible

• Consolidated code

The Other Side

• Use an establish CMS

• Fix Active Admin installation

• Use our admin tools to experiment with new technology

What next?

• Building our admin tools from scratch

• Start moving features over one at a time

• Starting with moving the blog into our ecosystem

Things we need to solve

• Isolating feature code

• Bower to make admin sections

Thank You

@michaelsbeckerwww.michaelseanbecker.com