2013 - now

live system 

Bristol Online Surveys (BOS) is an easy-to-use service that allows you to develop, deploy, and analyse surveys via the Web. No complicated set-up or technical knowledge is required.

BOS is used by over 300 organisations - approximately 130 universities plus by other public bodies and companies.

A unique feature of BOS is that multiple organisations can run the same survey simultaneously to form 'Benchmarking Clubs' to get answers to common questions or issues. Local questions can be added to the core if required and these are excluded from the cross-organisational comparisons.

I worked on the full system rewrite from Perl to Python and Django, with a Postgres and Cassandra backend.

EuroPython

For Europython 2012 I have created a poster session for BOS, along with a talk inspired by adding federated authorisation to the system.

Scaling a national survey system

Delivering a national system for UK universities required significant work on performance.
The service has high load spikes when surveys are scheduled for the entire sector - eg. hundreds of universites. Or when some universities run a survey across large cohorts of students on a particular day and time.  I also presented a talk about load testing the best deployment infrastructure for handling these spikes at my local Django meetup.