Sunscreen

Sunscreen is a combination of mobile application + web application used for managing large-scale solar construction projects, commissioned by Swinerton Renewable Energy, the #1 ranked solar contractor in the USA.

The project was designed, branded, and led by the intrepid team at The Engine is Red. They owned the product vision, the design, and the client relationship, and they brought us on to build the backend that everything else would stand on.

Quality assurance on a utility-scale solar project is, at its heart, a paper problem. A single project connects tens of thousands of construction components, and each one has to move through inspection and sign-off before the project can. When that tracking lives on paper, the information is stuck where it was written down. Field teams fill out forms, the forms travel back to an office, and the people responsible for the overall project are always looking at a picture that is days old and expensive to assemble.

Swinerton wanted a digital solution to that paper problem: an iPad app their field teams would actually use on site, and desktop tools giving the office real insight into the progress of each project. What the project needed from us was the entire server side: the data model that could represent a solar project honestly, the rules that govern how work moves through it, and the API that the mobile app would live on.

The scale is what makes that server side interesting. A QA tool for a small job site can afford to be loose about its data. A system connecting tens of thousands of components per project cannot, because at that volume any ambiguity about what a status means, or who changed it, gets multiplied tens of thousands of times.

We developed a Ruby on Rails application to act as the backend for the Sunscreen iOS app. It provides an API for consumption by the mobile app, and it also provides an elegant web interface for insights into the overall progress of each solar construction project. Three parts of the build carried most of the weight.

First, the data model and the rules on top of it. We set up state-driven project management rules connecting tens of thousands of construction components, so that every component moves through its lifecycle in a controlled way and the status of the whole project is always derivable from the status of its parts. Modeling that correctly up front is what makes the difference between a system that reflects reality and one the field teams quietly stop trusting.

Second, access control. We set up permissions-based user roles, because a QA system spanning field crews and project management needs to be precise about who can see what and who can change what. A sign-off only means something if the system can say exactly who was allowed to give it.

Third, the API itself. The iOS app was built by another contractor, which makes the API a contract between two codebases: every endpoint we shipped was something their app depended on. We built a robust test suite to cover all aspects of the API and backend, so changes on our side could not quietly break the app in the field, and the two teams could build in parallel without stepping on each other. The platform runs on PostgreSQL and Redis on AWS infrastructure.

Sunscreen replaced paper-based QA management with tools fitted to how the work actually happens: an iPad app in the field, backed by an API built to support it, and a web interface that gives the office a live view of overall project progress instead of a reconstructed one. The state-driven rules mean the system always knows where each of those tens of thousands of components stands, and the permissions model means every action in it is accountable.

Agencies bring us in on projects like this because a dependable backend partner lets them say yes to product work beyond the browser.

For a business run on construction schedules, QA data now enters the system once, at the moment it is collected, and every view of the project flows from there.