Reviving an app with no source code
Attuning a Student — an education-assessment tool for a nonprofit
The engagement
Attuning a Student is a web-based education-assessment tool owned by the QED Foundation, a New Hampshire nonprofit. By the time QED reached out, the app was only partly working - and they couldn’t get the source code from the original programmers. As their Community Director put it: “We were not able to get any source code from the original programmers.”
That’s the defining fact of this engagement. The starting point was a partly-functional legacy Rails app with no clean handoff. The relationship ran from 2022 through at least 2025 - roughly two and a half years of recovery, migration, and ongoing maintenance.
What we did
- Recovered a legacy app with no source handoff - worked from the client’s screenshot-and-issue spreadsheet and the legacy hosting files, rebuilding broken flows from scratch where there was nothing to start from.
- Fixed the core questionnaire flows - the Teacher’s View data-input link, Print Blank Views, respondent assignment, and the student-work-analysis pages that were all returning “the page you were looking for doesn’t exist.”
- Migrated hosting onto AWS - stood up an EC2 instance on Rocky Linux 8, handled the DNS cutover, and confirmed the new version before the old hosting was torn down. The goal was cost savings for the nonprofit.
- Owned SSL and uptime - set up Let’s Encrypt with automatic renewal after a lapsed certificate caused an outage, diagnosed a post-reboot outage where the app process hadn’t auto-restarted, and added monitoring so outages page the team.
- Kept the framework current - proposed and, in 2025, executed Rails version and security upgrades.
Stack
- Ruby on Rails (upgraded toward Rails 8.x)
- AWS EC2 / Rocky Linux 8
- Let's Encrypt
- Amazon SES