Fab Foundation

The Fab Foundation runs the global network of Fab Labs that came out of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, and I was the engineer behind SCOPES-DF, the WordPress application where educators in that network build, publish and share digital fabrication lesson plans with each other.

Key Takeaways

  • Made the platform's most important surface, the lesson library serving 2,300+ Fab Labs across 120+ countries, fast and dependable.
  • Rebuilt the lesson builder, the authenticated authoring application at the heart of the site, so teachers could write, save and publish structured lesson plans with confidence.
  • Cleaned roughly 600,000 redundant database rows, about 63% of the database, and tuned the platform to run comfortably within its resources.
  • Shipped internationalization for the lesson builder, with browser-language detection and right-to-left layout support.
  • Supported the site's embedding inside SOLIDWORKS xDesign, with navigation built so a student inside a CAD application never loses their place.
  • Modernized the stack to PHP 8.2, put Cloudflare in front of the site, and brought bandwidth consumption under control.

Organization

The Fab Foundation is the Boston nonprofit coordinating the global Fab Lab network that grew out of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, now more than 2,300 labs across 120+ countries. SCOPES-DF is its K-12 education platform: a public WordPress site wrapped around an authenticated authoring application where teachers build and publish digital fabrication lesson plans, with funders including Chevron and SOLIDWORKS behind specific programs.

Challenge

The platform is a deliverable to funders as well as a service to educators: a teacher with a laser cutter and no curriculum needs to find a vetted lesson plan, and a teacher who has written a good one needs to publish it. The application had grown faster than its foundations, and the authoring experience the whole community depends on needed sustained engineering attention.

Solution

  • A stabilization phase first: PHP 8.2 compatibility, plugin rationalisation, and systematic hardening across the templates the community uses most.
  • A deep database cleanup and repair pass, restoring performance headroom across the whole site.
  • The lesson builder rebuilt through feature branches: authoring, drafts, validation and publishing made dependable.
  • Internationalization with English and Arabic support, including right-to-left layout.
  • Navigation work for the SOLIDWORKS embedding: section navigation, jump-to-top and a mobile lesson menu.
  • Cloudflare configured in front of the site, with bandwidth analysis keeping bot traffic from consuming the plan.

Results

  • Peak memory on the lesson index from 2GB to 40MB.
  • Member-reported issues down roughly 60%.
  • 250+ community lessons served to the global network.
  • Organic search visibility up roughly 30%.
  • 123 releases shipped across 16 months of development.