An approach to software delivery
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.
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.
At the start of this relatively straightforward epic, there were a number of “terminal” loan statuses already in existence: abandoned, expired decision, expired contract, and finalized. Somehow missing from this list was a way for lenders to withdraw a loan in the FG LOS. We had to integrate this functionality with many other services across the site including user permissions, the automatic decision engine, the decision status cron, and application queues.
Symitar, a software system powering hundreds of credit unions, uses collateral codes for all loan types regardless of whether they are secured or unsecured. In an effort to comply with industry standards, we needed a Symitar integration to provide options to allow the user to supply a collateral core code for every loan type defined in their system. The newly defined collateral code can now be sent to the Symitar core on loan approval, thus allowing banks another way to distinguish loan types.
The task to be solved consisted of enforcing a 4-digit max size to Symitar core codes. It sounded easy enough, but a quick run through the domain revealed that core id fields were spread across eight different admin pages, each uniquely structured, implemented within their own context. I had to extend existing jQuery Validation library functionality to accept custom messages and errors returned from Ajax requests to the back-end. My eventual solution was done in a way to be easily extendible to future core implementations.
FinanceGenius software emails developers an XML-formatted debugging string when an error is encountered. The problem was that certain email clients were treating XML tags as if they were HTML. The goal of this ticket was to properly render these entities using any email client.
The Executive Dashboard began as a one-off project that allowed Intel executives to quickly assess the effectiveness of current marketing campaigns across the twittersphere. Client admins are now able to quickly create any number of custom dashboards, each consisting of tabbed dataviews that present easy-to-digest social business intelligence in a number of customizable ways.
The Acessa site offered many challenges during development. This W2OPress implementation features WP admin page stacking to break content into smaller, more easily digestible parts across endlessly scrolling pages. The client is given total control of the full-width banner widgets interspersed between sections. Bootstrapped from this functionality, I built automatically generated, in-page navigation.
I suppose due to all the awards given to the design of the MasterCard Engagement Bureau, MasterCard Biz decided a redesign mixing old with new was in order. All that was left to do was to bring the old site into the W2OPress fold.
The MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth had heard good things from the MasterCard Newsroom group regarding our work and needed a site redesign for an upcoming conference. This was the first opportunity to build a website using our new official software offering, W2OPress. I created a pinterest-styled interface and added ajax friendly ‘load more posts’ functionality to our suite of Wordpress plugin submodules. The entire site was developed, QA’d, debugged, and production-ready within five weeks.
