Our new creation : growthcharts.me

No more static growth charts

Growth charts are an essential tool for both pediatricians and parents, that provide a standard for the comparison of a child’s development, gith some given functions.

The growth charts provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) are widely accepted as the most trusted resource for the estimation of a child’s development.

Yet, the WHO growth charts only provide an estimation for five initial values, leaving us to compare our child’s development with one of the given charts.

GrowthCharts.me was developed with a clear goal in mind : to provide a unique, personalized chart for any child, according to the child’s genre, date of birth and initial weight.

The technology behind GrowthCharts.me

The application was developed using Laravel 5.4, the most advanced PHP framework. For the database entries we picked up SQLite as the fastest of our options.

On the front-end of the application we had a unique choice for the chart creation : Chart.js

Chart.js along with Moment.js form the ideal combination for displaying a child’s growth along a time axis.

We also picked Vue.js to build our chart components with their own properties, to make our code reusable and maintainable.

Bootstrap was also a natural choice for the CSS styling, resulting in a responsive, mobile-friendly layout.

Laravel elixir that comes with the version 5.4 of the framework, forced us to use Webpack, which was an absolute delight, especially when we realized that, out of the box, the application scored a double A performance result on the GTMetrix test.

Lastly, as with most of our recent projects, we secured our application by issuing a SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.

The next steps for GrowthCharts.me

As of now, the application only provides weight growth charts, as it’s the most necessary chart to compare a child’s growth, especially for breast-feeding mothers.

In the near future, we will add the two other charts, for the height and the head perimeter, that complement the set of WHO growth charts.

We also have other interesting features in mind, but, as always, you may propose us your own by leaving a comment, below.