Angel Nest

• Hacker News comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2891907
• Reddit comments: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jkr8r/developer_opensources_200_hr_project_after_client/
• The story behind this: http://fredwu.me/post/9036730472/open-sourcing-a-200-hour-project-the-story-behind-it
• The things I have learnt: http://fredwu.me/post/9703934823/startup-vc-and-the-things-i-learnt-from-open-sourcing

Testimonials from HNers

• Holy shit the code is clean. Good job dude. I'm impressed by your .SCSS too. Good quality dev right here.

• Something not noted: he's turned a negative event (getting stiffed) into positive exposure for his work with hundreds of HN readers. At least at a glance, it seems like solid and clean Rails / Ruby code (and I think I've seen some other commenters noting that as well.) I'd be surprised if this post didn't result in at least one new client down the road... nicely played.

What is Angel Nest?

Angel Nest is the code name of a project initially commissioned by a so called entrepreneur. The system itself and the business are modelled after AngelList. The goal of this project was to become one of the first ones targeted at the Chinese entrepreneurship and investment market.

Why is it open-sourced now?

After spending 200+ hours developing the system, not a dime has been seen or given. The work itself has given me an incredible amount of stress due to the tight schedule and the ever delaying job contract.

Weeks have gone by without any light of payment coming through, thereby I am releasing the source code, hopefully it will at least benefit some people who might be interested.

What is the state of the system?

The system, even though was developed under pressure, is in a reasonably good state. It has sufficient unit test coverage (though no view tests or integration tests) and in some parts the UI works better than AngelList. The front-end JavaScript code is a bit hacky and messy however.

Are you going to develop this further?

Probably no, but if you think this system could be used for something else, and you would like to work on it together, please feel free to drop me a line.

This system sucks

Well duh. I have my day job as well as my own adventure to worry about on top of this stressful project, so please cut me some slack. ;)

System Info

Stack

• ruby 1.9
• rails 3.2

Setup Instructions

• gem install bundler
• bundle install

Run Test Suites

• rake spec for integration and unit tests

Development Notes

In order to keep DB migration to minimum, migration files are modified during the development. Please run rake dev:db:reset to keep your database schema up to date.

Setup Guide

In order to run the system (for demo and development purposes), you may follow the following steps:

• clone the repo, obviously
• if you use RVM, you may rename the _rvmrc file to .rvmrc and adjust its content accordingly
• copy or rename config/database.example.yml to config/database.yml and adjust its content accordingly
• bundle install
• rake db:create
• rake dev:db:reset
• rails s
• done, fire up your browser and browse to http://localhost:3000/ :)
• the default login is [email protected] and password password

License

Dual licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses.