eROI releases Moonit into the wild

After months of development, and over a year of brainstorming, Moonit LLC unveiled moonit.com at TechCrunch50 2009 today. As the primary back end developer for this site I felt compelled to be a huge cheerleader for this site as it is the latest example of the incredible talent of the developers, designers and managers at eroi. In a nutshell, the site is a new social network for people interested in testing their compatibility with people they are in relationships with or could potentially enter a relationship with. By filling in a couple of birth dates, users are able to get a calculated percentage and a cheeky “reading” gauging compatibility between two people in either a platonic, romantic, or business relationship. A neat graph is also provided to track the progress of a relationship giving you a visual indicator of how well you are doing together. The site overall is entertaining and will certainly compel people to satisfy their curiosity about their own relationships.

The site was built from scratch in PHP using the Zend Framework and Doctrine on the back end and jQuery on the frontend. Many of the practices featured on this site were used to construct the site, such as Domain Model Programming, unobtrusive javascript, Model-View-Controller and D.R.Y. principles. For a beta release, I must say that it’s been one of the smoothest launches I’ve experienced to date (as i’m knocking on my wooden desk).

What made this site especially interesting to work on was the method by which we constructed it between our development team.  Like any agency, we have a process which we try to adhere to when building large sites. We changed it up a little bit by experimenting with a new method of development. The main difference from our normal process is that we constructed a fully functional prototype using a wireframe-like interactive ui all while design was still going through the approval process. Doing this, I was unencumbered with having to wait for the approval process to proceed and I was able to build the core functionality of the site in less than 2 weeks. At this early stage of development, Moonit LLC was able to test their proprietary algorithms all while they were still choosing the color scheme for the site which gave us a very long and comfortable QA period for the back end. By doing it this way, I believe this allowed us to deploy a very solid and relatively bug free application.

Go try it out. http://moonit.com

Press Release: http://www.pitchengine.com/free-release.php?id=25558