Week 493

On Tuesday we took James out to lunch to celebrate his birthday. We enjoyed some tasty food and riverside views at the The Narrow in Limehouse. For the rest of the week we continued our work for BHRRC.

Modern Slavery Registry

We continued our work on the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre’s Modern Slavery Registry. Some of the larger pieces of work were:

• Moving the storage of modern slavery statement snapshots out of the postgres database and into Amazon’s S3. We used Rails’ new ActiveStorage backend to do this.
• We made it easier to bulk upload statements that fall under a specific legislation. This will help the team add a large number of statements under the Californian legislation.
• We improved the search functionality by leveraging postgres’s full text searching and search aliases.
• Linking statements to their corresponding company pages on the BHRRC website.
• Displaying a chart of the number of new statements added over time for admins.
• Make it easier to create a local full-text index of all the PDF statements uploaded. This makes it easier for the team to analyse the content of the statements. We may want to add a feature like this to the site in the future but for now we’ve decided to add the statements to the team’s OneDrive account where the text can be indexed.
• Create scripts to provision the production environment on AWS