📚 whoami 🚲
(2010..Time.now) dev: ThoughtWorks -> Braintree -> Breadcrumb (Groupon) -> ThoughtWorks ->
Square -> Sempre Health -> Parachute Health
Healthtech
🪂 Parachute Health 🪂 better ordering for Durable Medical Equipment (we are hiring)
A lead of the Ruby for Good CASA project 2019 - 🚀️
I have been a developer since 2010.
I started my career at ThoughtWorks, and
I've worked in a variety of industries including airlines and payment processing.
And now I work in healthtech.
I work in healthtech because I have figured out what I want to do with the rest of my life,
which by the way is terrifying,
I plan to spend my forseeable future taking my revenge on the USA healthcare system
by trying to improve it.
Fast Definitions
⚖️ CASA is a nonprofit which trains volunteers to help foster youth
✨
💎❤️ Ruby for Good️ is a nonprofit which builds software for other nonprofits
(mostly in ruby)
✨
The Ruby for Good CASA project ✨🛠 is software written by Ruby for Good to help
CASA
Some fast definitions- CASA is a nonprofit which trains volunteers to help foster youth
This talk is about
✨
https://github.com/rubyforgood/casa
✨
creating
an ecosystem
for writing OSS
SaaS OSS
serving volunteers
who serve foster youth
This talk is about creating an ecosystem for writing open source software, specifically software as a
service open source software, to serve volunteers- who serve foster youth.
raise your hand if
you have ever thought about the USA foster care system
(raise your hand if) you have ever thought about the USA foster care system? - Thank you, you can put
your hands down.
(USA specific) foster system
Details differ per state. There are over four hundred thousand youth in the foster care system on any
given day.
~50 years ago
"Every child placed in foster care must have court oversight to ensure that both the
child’s and the parents’ legal rights are protected until the child reaches a safe, permanent home"
"The first CASA Program was founded in 1977 by Judge David Soukup, a Juvenile Court judge in Seattle,
Washington who felt that he was making critical decisions
about children’s lives without adequate information. He began recruiting volunteers from the community
to work one-on-one with children in foster care. The volunteer advocate, or “CASA,” is appointed by a
juvenile court judge to a child in foster care. The CASA then gets to know their assigned child, gathers
information from everyone in the child’s life (including the child’s biological parents, foster parents,
medical and mental health professionals, social workers, therapists, teachers, and attorneys) and
prepares a written report giving the judge in the child’s court case detailed information about the
situation and the child’s needs."
Fifty years ago in the seventies there was a judge who felt that he didn't know enough about the
situations of foster youth to make informed decisions about their care. Decisions like
who the legal guardian of the youth will be and what the rules around visitation
are. To fix this, he created the organization that grew into CASA.
The CASA organization
Today, CASA is a national organization with many local chapters, corresponding to the organization of
the courts where the volunteers serve. Over ninety thousand volunteers in almost all states, each go
through
over thirty hours of training plus ongoing continuing education. They are sworn in by a judge and commit
to serve for several years. Each volunteer is assigned to one youth- sometimes two when there are
siblings- and follow up on the youth's care by talking to everyone involved.
Some volunteers are law students, some are retired, and they are very good at what they do, but doing
the paperwork is sometimes hard.
The court report is due every six ish months depending on court schedule, and has a specific format.
CASA Funding 💵 📊
"CASA [of Southwest Missouri] relies on a diverse revenue base, foundations and the United Way,
individual and corporate contributions, public grants"
casaswmo.org/who-we-are/frequent-questions
"The DFA awards two types of CASA grants (...) To be eligible to
receive a CASA Grant, an applicant must-"
courts.state.md.us/.../casaspecialconditions.pdf
"In California, most CASA programs are non-profit organizations and receive funding from a variety of
other sources."
courts.ca.gov/documents/CASA.pdf
Different CASA regions are funded in different ways. In general they find and manage their own funding.
Existing processes
CASA volunteer talks to people
biological parents, foster parents, medical and mental health
professionals, social workers, therapists, teachers, attorneys
Take notes
Don't forget any involved parties! 🤔
📝 Court Report .docx / 6 months
💼 Supervisor of volunteers helps!
🚘 Mileage reimbursement
📖 Ongoing training
💰 Grant proposal evidence
How do they do what they do, currently?
A CASA volunteer communicates with the youth, parents, health professionals, teachers, and many others.
They take notes and help with reminders and accountability.
There are several supervisors per CASA organization.
They help the volunteer
craft the court report and keep up with the youth's situation.
Volunteers are unpaid but
can sometimes get mileage reimbursements.
The volunteer attends ongoing training on a regular basis.
The volunteer's notes, if they have been submitted to the CASA organization through the supervisor, are
useful contributing documentation when CASA organizations are providing evidence for their usefulness,
like when applying for grants.
Prior art 🎨
SimplyOptima CasaManager Salesforce.org (nonprofit) Paper forms hand-delivered to CASA regional office
Personal email
SMS text message
Fax
There are other software tools that CASA organizations tend to use. We are not competing with them.
Our work complements and coexists with these solutions. Our uniqueness is we are maximally simple for
the volunteer, free, and we work closely with the CASA organizations to implement changes they want.
Volunteer retention
✨ volunteer - supervisor communication 1️⃣
📞 Volunteer - Supervisor Communication 2️⃣
🚀 VOLUNTEER - SUPERVISOR COMMUNICATION 3️⃣
Volunteer retention is very important.
The biggest predictor of volunteer retention is their relationship with their supervisor.
Our goal is to supplement, enhance, and ease that relationship, NOT replace it or distance it.
💎❤️ Ruby for Good
A nonprofit writing software (primarily in ruby) for many nonprofits
Human Essentials, Terrastories, Circulate Tool Library for Chicago and beyond, Shelter Assist,
Mutual Aid, Abalone, and others!
Project list rubyforgood.org/our-work/impact
A friendly place to start doing OSS + learn by doing
2 yearly conferences (east/west USA)
Slack rubyforgood.herokuapp.com
What is Ruby for Good? Who are WE? How do WE help?
💎❤️ Ruby for Good -> CASA
A former Prince George County (MD) CASA volunteer joined Ruby for Good
2019 - I signed up for a conference!
Team lead? Sure! ✅ ("Details TBD")
Assigned to CASA 👍
Planning, UI mockups, DB schema...
2020 surprise 😱 remote 😱 conference 💎❤️
How did Ruby for Good and CASA meet up? A former CASA volunteer joined Ruby for Good and said-
hey, I know some people who could use some software...
So what did we build? Here is our login page.
The photo from CASA marketing- we chose one with only a youth, as a reminder of what we're here for.
The webapp is fully responsive for mobile, so that volunteers can easily use it from whatever device
they have with them, in whatever place they are. We have an Android app which is a thin shell over our
responsive webview.
This is the most important page in the app, where a volunteer enters a case contact.
A case contact is when the volunteer talks to someone about the youth's case.
These categories and contact types are fully customizable for each CASA organization and for each case-
for example, a youth might not have a sibling, so a supervisor would de-select Sibling from the contact
type list for this case, so that the volunteer can look at their contact checklist without distractions.
Here is the second half of the most important page, and the most important field on the most important
page, which is notes. Notes in production average 400 - 1000 words. The vast majority of all case
contacts have notes.
When a case contact has been created, you come back to the case details page.
Every button here was a github issue- there are dozens of pull requests showing on this page.
Here is where an admin can export a CSV of mileage reimbursement requests,
or use our flexible data exporter to get any data out of the system.
Import is one of the technically trickier parts of the system. It's used for importing all the
supervisors, volunteers, and cases when a new CASA joins the system, and when a new batch of CASA
volunteers complete training, are sworn in, and are assigned to youth cases. They can also be added one
at a time but this is more efficient for streamlining onboarding.
After importing a volunteer, they can be edited, assigned to a case, assigned to a supervisor.
meta
Why do (our) contributors volunteer?
Job credibility 👩🏽💻
Open Source Software 👨🏽💻
Meet the kind of people 🙋🏻 who put time into helping other people 🙋🏻
(Why do volunteers volunteer?) Why do contributors contribute?
This is on my mind a lot.
Theory of maintenance
(my) maintaining is 80% making it easy for OTHER people to do work 💪 🛠
Be a safety net ⚡️⚕️
So why do maintainers maintain? And how? For me, most of what I do is making it easy for other people to
do work. I love other people doing work.
SAAS
🔒 You are holding someone’s data; keep it safe! 😰
⛔️🔨🛠 non technical stakeholders
📞 customer support + uptime
What you're not holding, you can't drop
our priorities
Data safety 🔒
Empower CASA volunteers 💖
Improve CASA organizational efficiency 💖
Help contributors grow skills 🌱
Don’t give the foster youth’s data to people who shouldn’t have it
What works?
✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
(for us)
Human impact && stakeholder interactions
Cadence and breaks
Ruby for Good Conferences
🎃😱😭🚀
Calendar
Slack
GitHub
Deployment
Code
Fast PR merge
Community
💻🌱
What works? I have a LIST!
✅ Human impact
Clear & simple causal chain to human impact
Some contributors have a personal connection
Stakeholder contact increases connection
The path between this work and helping someone is a short causal chain and that helps attracts and
retain contributors.
✅ Stakeholder interactions
Regular short check-ins for ideation
Notes doc 2019-present 📝
CASAs talk to each other 🎙
Weekly progress email
Always CC casa@rubyforgood.org
Smart typeform bug reporter 💡🐞
YouTube playlists
of product walk-throughs ▶️
We talk to our stakeholders regularly to hear about bugs, questions, and desired features.
We usually take notes in slack and drop the highlights into a a shared public doc-
I've been editing and reading the same document since 2019, which is an unusual feeling.
The stakeholders also enjoy sharing best practices with each other and listening to them helps us
understand what they do.
✅ Cadence and breaks
Weekly stakeholder sync
Weekly office hours (same day)
Weekly deploy
Slow/lean times between big events
Having a regular cadence for important tasks makes them easy to remember for everyone.
We skip one now and then for special events.
✅ Ruby for Good Conferences
2x / year (east / west coast USA)
New friends!
Speedrun onboarding
Project level deep direction setting
Speaking of big events, Ruby for Good's East coast event happened last week near DC.
At events like these, new joiners pick a project and make great contributions while enjoying
pair programming (optional but popular) and non-coding social events also.
These development sprints help us make enormous progress and set us up for success.
Most contributors choose one project to work on, but some try to get one PR into every project
which is fun too.
✅ Company "offsite" visitors
🏝⛱
"Power Week" with powerhrg.com
Various Ruby for Gooders' entire work teams
Non-developer work is a precious commodity in OSS
Contact casa@rubyforgood.org if you/r team are interested
💪💖
We are also happy to be a destination for companies who want to give back to their community,
and several companies have scheduled a day or a week to have their teams work on external code
as a team activity.
Power Home Remodeling is interesting in that they build a lot of software and they have a lot of
developers, enough to lend every r4g project to get a full team for a week.
If you're interested, email us.
✅ Calendar
To track special events like these and our regular events, we keep a public calendar,
owned by the shared account to prevent access issues as contributors come and go.
✅ Slack
Part of Ruby for Good slack
Active public channel
Channel reminders
Leads private channel
Bot channel (PRs, issues, errors, deploys)
We are part of the ruby for good slack which is great for cross-pollination between projects.
They provide moderation and invite management so we don't have to.
We have an active public channel with channel reminders for our meetings.
We also have a private channel for maintainers and that is also where our bug reporter form outputs.
We have a bot channel for PRs, issues, bugsnag errors, and heroku deploys. It's noisy and a good
heartbeat and historical record.
✅ Continuous Integration
Our continuous integration runs all our tests on every pull request and on the main branch on every new
PR merge. It is split into PARALLEL named build sections- it's convenient to be able to see which small
part failed for fast feedback on a red build. Our CI runs on Github Actions
✅ GitHub
Continuous integration split into named build sections
Dependabot 💖
Project management 📊
Workflows (auto-comment, auto-unassign) via github actions
Wiki
PR templates
Issue templates
PR merging strategy ➡️✅😱 (TBC)
Dependabot opens PRs to keep your dependencies up to date, which is much better than ignoring them until
you need to upgrade and something strange broke long ago.
✅ GitHub permissions
🔒 Protect your main branch!
🌳 Branches - maintainer-merger convenience
🍴 Forks - more educational
No one should be able to force-push to your main branch. If you really need to, remove the permission
blockage, do the needful, and then put your protective gear back on.
Issue Templates
You can tell by the emoji that I have been here!
Building a template is an art
This is built of the best pieces of many excellent artifacts.
We want the minimum that will make for better user contributions.
We want to guide new contributors without discouraging them
✅ Deployment
PR merge -> auto-deploys to QA 🛺
Manual deploy to staging
Manual deploy to prod 🚀
Deploy checklist ✉️
Check on DB backups 📀
Check on email health
Heroku teams + pipelines
Heroku scheduler (cron) 🕒
Papertrail (logs) 📄
Bugsnag 🐞
When a PR is merged, it automatically deploys to the QA environment.
Then there is a button in heroku to press to manually deploy to staging, and from there to prod.
✅ Code
Test LOTS
Limit javascript
Readme!
Dependencies: stick to standards, stay basic and picky e.g. devise, pundit, draper,
bootstrap, factorybot, letter_opener, sablon
StandardRB linting
Realistic seed data
Docker or not 🐋
Thin android app for better user experience
We have code. We have lots of tests, because our only defence against ourselves is tests.
A PR without sufficient testing may be merged, but we'll ask the contributor for a follow-up PR with
improvements, or file a chore to add more tests.
✅ Fast PR merge!!!
Retention & growth 🌱 📈 ✨
Lead approves, lead merges 💨
Merging deploys, but not to production
Deployment pipeline as safety net ⚽️ 🥅
Test LOTS 💯
Fast merging increases contributor stickiness. We need contributor stickiness!
People stick around because they feel their work is valued.
cultural expectation: maintainer approves and merges. Requests changes in follow-up PR or create chore.
Reduces chances of merge conflicts. We started doing it during conferences, and
continued because we like the way it feels. Not all r4g projects do that, just us.
This is extra safe because merging does not equal deploying.
Learning to write new tests is a skill that many new contributors value and want to practice.
Test-only tickets are popular.
this is slide 44
✅ Community
Ruby for Good negotiates for compute resources for *all* projects
Cross-project help squad
Second-order backup for AFK maintainers
r4g is my safety net like I am the contributor's safety net
Keep doing
✅ 💖
Be people at each other
Chill sometimes ☃️
Group events! 🎳
Use powerful tools 🛠
Deploy often and carefully 💪
Wary code choices 🔮
Accept PRs joyfully 🙏
Community
✨ 💎 ❤️
This is custom advice. It may not apply to your situation.
Hard things
❌ 😰 😭 😱 ❌
(for us)
Need more issues
System edges
Historical records
Testing is hard
Feedback
❓
This is custom advice. It may not apply to your situation.
❌ More issues, please!
Small bites 🍪
2-10 / week
ALL / 3 days (during conferences)
This is a great problem?
Writing issues takes effort
Unlike many other open source projects, the majority of our issues are created by maintainers based on
discussions with stakeholders. Which takes work. We go through a few issues a week during regular weeks,
and we run out of 150+ issue backlogs during big events.
❌ System edges - Import
(table-based data)
Volunteers, cases, supervisors, and the linkages between them
Override existing data by unique key? 🔨
De-duplicate duplicate rows? 🤦🏻
Partial error - row 1 succeeds, row 2 fails 🛑 ➡️ 🛑 ↩️
Row dependencies- row 3 references row 2 and 1. Keep it? ⏭⏮
Display per-row errors 🛠
What do we import? Volunteers, cases, supervisors, and the linkages between them.
Bugs happen around the edges- for us, data imports are a continual struggle even with lots of tests.
Import is easy to do, hard to get right.
❌ System edges - Export
Word documents are hard
User supplied court report template format with header logo (one per CASA organization, + a
default)
User-created data (case contacts)
Slice and dice date-based data
Yay sablon (rubygem)
Stakeholders need Word. Not many contributors have it. Nice formatting in something you can't see is
hard.
❌ Memory
Search Slack history
Search old github issues
Meeting notes doc 2019-present
Wiki
Architectural Decision Records
Verbal history
It's never enough
I don't think we can fix this
All projects have this issue and we do too
❌ What is a good test?
Good testing is a skill not as easy to specify in acceptance criteria as visible functionality
How do you teach good testing?
❌ Missing-contributor feedback
The people who leave don't say why. Measure what happens . Hear the concerns of the people who
stay
Some people show up one time and leave and we never hear from them again. We will never know what
happened.
Working on
📈 💪 😅 🛠
Backlog
System edges 🐉
Future Archaeology
Testing
Contributor feedback
❓
We have lots of fun and interesting work to do. If this work sounds like good work to you, come and
bring your friends and coworkers
💡 Encouraged contributors... 💡
💡 ...become strong contributors 💡
Many of our contributors come in because a friend tells them that we are the kind of project that will
let them work!
📝 A note on purpose
What is your project's purpose?
Improve the world! ✨
What are your contributors' purposes?
OSS skills, job credibility, learn 👩🏽💻
What are your users' purposes?
Serving CASA youth 💪
What is your purpose as a maintainer?
Smooth the path 🛣
What are you here for? What is someone else here for?
Tips 💡
When you want users to upload a spreadsheet, provide a downloadable sample spreadsheet
Use github workflows to automate polite stale issue un-assignment to replace maintainer emotional
labor
PRs that each deployed cleanly may not deploy cleanly together
Word documents save edit history- check for sensitive info before attaching one to a github
issue
spreadsheet
to recap...
Multi-level safety nets 🥅⚽️✨
Serve stakeholders 📈 and grow contributors 🌱Strong cadence 📅
Sustainable ♻️ maintainership requires rest 💤 and a community 👋 (for me)
Our safety nets are: multiple maintainers, a deployment pipeline, lots of tests, a backing organization
like
ruby for good, cross-talk with other projects. Safety nets allows people to move faster.
Send halp
More CASA regional organizations - we're at ~4/900+
PM, QA, design!!! 📊 🐞 🎨
PRs, especially testing & refactoring 🍦
🚲 @goldlindastein
✨
@rubyforgood 💎
linda@rubyforgood.org ✨ casa@rubyforgood.org
Join us on slack!
rubyforgood.herokuapp.com
What I want most is more CASAs on the platform! We are free and friendly and we want to be useful.
If you know someone who is involved in the foster care system we would love an introduction! Please
email us.
# seed realistic case numbers
@case_number_sequence = 1000
CASE_TYPES = ["CINA", "TPR", ""]
def generate_case_number # format different per region! PG CASA
# CINA-YY-XXXX Child In Need of Assistance
# TPR-YY-XXXX Termination of Parental Rights
years = ((DateTime.now.year - 20)..DateTime.now.year).to_a
yy = years.sample(random: rng).to_s[2..3]
@case_number_sequence += 1
"#{CASE_TYPES.sample(random: rng)}-#{yy}-#{@case_number_sequence}"
end
Case numbers are meaningful. When we show data to our Subject Matter Experts, SMEs, it's important that
the data be realistic because many SMEs are hyper-sensitive to invalid or unrealistic data. For example,
occasionally one of our users points out that in our test data, a case with a number starting in 00
should have emancipated by now, and a case with a YY field of 20 cannot reasonably be a transition aged
youth because they are 1 year old, not a teenager.
Fictive Kin
Fictive Kin – children are placed with an individual, unrelated by birth or marriage, who has personal
or emotional ties with the children or their family prior to the placement (e.g. family friends, school
staff, babysitters, etc.). Someone who is known to, and trusted by, the child(ren).
The Kinship Care and Fictive Kin Reform Act ... allows the Department to place the child with a relative
or individual not related by birth,
adoption, or marriage, but who maintains an emotionally significant relationship with the child.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictive_kinship
https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/outofhome/kinship
https://www.alec.org/model-policy/the-kinship-care-and-fictive-kin-reform-act/
https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/foster-care/kinship-care
### What github issue is this PR for, if any?
Resolves #2XXX
### What changed, and why?
### How will this affect user permissions?
- Volunteer permissions:
- Supervisor permissions:
- Admin permissions:
### How is this tested? (please write tests!) 💖💪
### Screenshots please :)
### Feelings gif (optional)
What gif best describes your feeling working on this issue? https://giphy.com/
How to embed:
``
A balance between too much and too little - too much work vs too little information
Working with Word docs
Not all developers have Word
Google Drive does not render the same
LibreOffice does not render the same
Deleted content is still present- watch out for invisible sensitive data
Not all developers have Word
Google Drive does not render the same
LibreOffice does not render the same
Deleted content is still present- watch out for invisible sensitive data
gem "after_party" # post-deployment tasks
gem "amazing_print" # easier console reading
gem "azure-storage-blob", require: false
gem "bootsnap", ">= 1.4.2", require: false # Reduces boot times through caching; required in config/boot.rb
gem "bugsnag" # tracking errors in prod
gem "devise" # for authentication
gem "devise_invitable"
gem "draper" # adds decorators for cleaner presentation logic
gem "faker" # creates realistic seed data, valuable for staging and demos
gem "filterrific" # filtering and sorting of models
gem "image_processing", "~> 1.12" # Set of higher-level helper methods for image processing.
gem "jbuilder", "~> 2.11" # Build JSON APIs with ease. Read more: https://github.com/rails/jbuilder
gem "lograge" # log less so heroku papertrail quits rate limiting our logs
gem "noticed" # Notifications
We use after_party to run data migrations to backfill data- runs automatically after deploy.
gem "paper_trail" # tracking changes
gem "paranoia", "~> 2.2" # For soft-deleting purpose
gem "pg", ">= 0.18", "< 2.0" # Use postgresql as the database for Active Record
gem "puma", "~> 5.4" # Use Puma as the app server
gem "pundit" # for authorization management - based on user.role field
gem "rack-attack" # for blocking & throttling abusive requests
gem "request_store"
gem "sablon" # Word document templating tool for Case Court Reports
gem "skylight" # automated performance testing https://www.skylight.io/
gem "webpacker", "~> 5.4" # Transpile app-like JavaScript. Read more: https://github.com/rails/webpacker
We use paper_trail to track object changes for later audit trails
Our maintainer selection
Informal
🛠 Do work ->
🎉 Get invited ->
💪 Get permissions ->
🛠 Do more work ->
😅 [Optional] fade away
💡 ...maybe we should change this?
Our pipeline and safety net- looks a lot like Jenkins if you squint.
✨github.com/rubyforgood/casa/graphs/contributors✨
