Projects: FinanceGenius

FinanceGenius

Manual Collateral

Since the beginning of time, collateral has been input into the LOS by means of a form that integrates with NADA. Due to the limitations of the NADA bookout service, new and rare cars are generally unacceptable to our system. The solution was to allow manual collateral input. Because we started collateral with NADA, the system was already somewhat complex, though some care was taken to abstract out the bookout type. Still, our solution had to expand upon that abstraction, particularly in back-end persistence and front-end KnockoutJS field bindings.

FinanceGenius

Major Refactor: Snapshots

Snapshots are a fundamental part of how the LOS functions. The problem was that we were treating snapshots like second-class citizens. Time for a refactor.

FinanceGenius

Loan Calculator Bugs

There were somewhere between 15 and 20 bugs reported. The actual number of bugs was unclear because many of them were overlapping or interrelated. So for three weeks, I fixed bugs whack-a-mole style, fixing one, then another, then going back and re-fixing the original after coming back and finding it broken anew… over and over and over again.

FinanceGenius

Agile Velocity Training

FinanceGenius hired Agile Velocity to come to the office for a two-day training session to teach the team how to deliver functionality faster and better using agile methodologies. Together, we learned that an agile approach can help software companies like ours by giving more credence to the worker’s voices who know their particular specialty better than those who manage them.

FinanceGenius

PHP Documentation Generator

In an effort to better document FG LOS software, primarily for developers working directly with the code, I was tasked to find a PHP documentation generator that would work well for our codebase. We were mainly interested in ease of use, but were also keen on a solution that offered decent default styling.

FinanceGenius

Observer: FG Admin Updates

The user story goes something like this: As an admin, I want updates to FinanceGenius LOS admin settings to propagate to the customer-facing LG portal so loans funnel in seamlessly.

FinanceGenius

Repair Broken Leads

The fine folks at *terrible contractor we were using that I will not call out by name* decided that if a lead funneling in from LoanappGenius (LG) did not transmit to a client’s FG LOS correctly, a cron would try again five minutes later. With any application, things can go wrong. With LG, things do go wrong. I start by interpreting mysterious and totally ambiguous error status codes. If I haven’t hooked you by this point, keep reading anyway.

FinanceGenius

Military Lending Act

The Military Lending Act was amended in September 2015 to place limits on how high an APR lenders could set for active military personnel. The real difficulty came after realizing the logic surrounding loan products and fees was now lacking. Their inclusion or exclusion affects MAPR values, and thus MLA rules. A refactor was in order because these can be updated in so many ways across the system.

FinanceGenius

LoanappGenius Mapping

A simple goal of fixing the mapping of a few fields in a customer-facing application to properly transmit their values through a non-trivial API network essentially became a sprint-long debug session because the contractor we hired was insane.

FinanceGenius

Specify Symitar Member IDs

Motivated by a need to honor discounted rates for current members, we needed to update the way we allow lenders to specify a borrower’s credit union member id. The new functionality would let the lender specify that id instead on the edit application page at the start of the loan process.