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Pair Research

Pair Research is a new kind of interaction developed by Miller, Zhang, Gilbert & Gerber designed to pair members of group together weekly to work on each other's projects.

This application takes the original Google Sheets prototype further, developing platform on which users can create customized groups to make pairings with, view analytics, and promote pairings and collaboration between certain subgroups (e.g. professors with students in a research lab)

Development

This project was developed with Meteor 1.3/1.4 best practices in mind. This section describes some architectural design decisions and any nonconventional dev solutions.

API Organization

Pair Research's general functionality depends on the following collections:

  • Affinities: The current set of N x N ratings between group members about how much they are capable of helping the other person with their task.
  • Groups: This is the main organizational unit of Pair Research, in which people participate in Pair Research together.
  • Pairings: This is the set of all pairings results generated per group
  • Tasks: The current set of tasks each group member wants to complete in a Pair Research session.
  • Meteor.users: The user organization unit, pulled in by the accounts-base and accounts-password packages.

Each collection has an appropriate set of methods in the same folder as the collection definition.

The Pair Research app provides a number of analytic functions in some archival collections. In particular, Affinities and Tasks only contains the current tasks of a user, so additional AffinitiesHistory and TasksHistory collections store historic info with some additional metadata. Currently, a PairsHistory collection also archives Pairing information. This might not be necessary.

We also extend the lodash and ReactiveDict packages in /imports/api/extensions and add some Blaze helpers in /imports/ui/blaze-helpers.js.

Any new files with package extensions or server-side API startup registrations (e.g. defining methods or publications) must be added to the appropriate register-api.js file in /imports/startup/[client|server].

Authentication

We've defined an authentication mixin that can be attached to any method. See /imports/api/authentication.js.

The Pair Research Script

Pair Research actually relies on a Python script to do the matching after we create the graph in Javascript (/imports/api/pairings/methods.js:makePairs). To run this script, we load it as an asset in the private/ folder and exec it.

Git Setup

There's two really important branches here: deploy and master. master is the main branch: be sure to never force push to master. deploy is always expected to be a number of commits ahead of masters (e.g. deploy settings, database migrations). In general, migrations consists of two commits: one for the actual deployment and one with the migration commented out and timestamped. To keep track of what version is live, avoid force pushing deploy until it's live. Use git rebase to keep the migrations as the latest commit.

Deployment

Pair Research is hosted on Galaxy and mLab. We host a production and staging server. It is recommended that all major changes be deployed to the staging server first for testing.

Setup

You will need the settings-staging.json and settings-production.json to deploy to the staging and production servers respectively. Please contact Kapil for the latest versions of these files.

Additionally, you will need access the the Galaxy and mLab accounts. Ask Haoqi to add you to DTR Galaxy account and ask Yongsung for his mLab credientials since the Pair Research database is under his account (note: In the future, we should probably do a migration to more easily scalable DB since we should be wary of hitting rate limits on this application).

Emails are sent using SendGrid. The details for the SMTP server used to send these emails are included in the .json files mentioned above.

Deploying

We provide two scripts that allow you to easily deploy to the servers, given you have completed the above steps.

npm run-script deploy-staging will deploy to the staging server at pair-staging.meteorapp.com.

npm run-script deploy-production will deploy to the production server at pairresearch.io.