About the WASL Report

In 2007, my wife and I were shopping for a new house. As new parents, we realized that for the first time we would have to consider the quality of the local schools.

Redfin has a terrific website for house hunting and they show the location of schools but they do not show any information on school performance. Sadly, having a school close by is not the same thing as having a good school close by.

It turns out the state of Washington has a standardized test for measuring student performance called the WASL. While the WASL test is highly controversial, it does provide one way to measure student performance. Even better, the state freely provides WASL and other school data on their website.

The problem was that there was no way to take the State's school data and combine it with the map view on Redfin. Whenever I see a need, I start to think about potential web-solutions.

At the same time this was going on, I was looking for a way to quickly build alpha-level webtools to test new ideas. After some research, I started learning to write Ruby on Rails code. I quickly realized that building a website to visualize school data with a map was a perfect starter application for Rails.

Thus reportCard, which became waslReport.com, was conceived.

As always happens with software, it turned out that my "simple" idea was a lot more work than I had thought but it was a terrific learning project. Inspired by this guy and this guy, I forged on.

Although I started with the idea of a mashup, waslreport really isn't one. Even though waslreport only has a few pages, it is a full-fledged web-application that touches many of today's web technologies. I used Ruby, Rails, mongrel, CSS, javascript, mysql, subversion, and xml. The tool was built with MacOS X on a macbook pro and deployed on Joyent.

Although it felt like nine months of work, I am pleased that my first rails-baby has finally seen the light of day. I hope it is as useful to you as it was for us.

Lastly, I want to be clear that I could not have built this website unless the state of Washington had provided the data on their own awesome (albeit mapless) website.

-k-
April, 2008