An app for the Ottawa area that determines your driving route to work and then texts you anytime there is a reported collision on one of the streets you use. Built as a learning opportunity and avoiding gems at all costs.
Collision reports are pulled from Twitter (using JSON with oAuth authentication - didn’t use the Twitter gem because it seemed like cheating), alerts are scheduled via a Heroku scheduler rake task and delayed job, and texts are sent from a forked Nexmo wrapper (added a sleep param to better handle North American SMS throughput limitations)
Overall, this app (as it stands) probably violates the Google Maps TOS and possibly Canadian copyright law (not sure if Tweets are copyrighted or not - seems to be a grey area). Nevertheless, it’s useful and was great to build.
Still not done, though, as tests are virtually non-existent (which is abhorent, I know - but I’m working on getting better with Test::Unit before I tackle it)