My employment with Snow Valley started in November 2004, and I was the youngest to join the company by 5 years, but I was armed with just over a years commercial experience with asp.net / c#.net, so I was able to hit the ground running.
During my time at Snow Valley, I became the "central repository" for a few of our clients - Herbert Smith, Halfords, and a big majority of our internal tools
Herbert Smith is one of the UKs largest law firms, with over 1,100 lawyers across the entire company. Snow Valley created the site in late 2004 based on Microsoft Content Management Server.
After the initial site development and deployment, I became responsible for the continued development, and bug fixing on this site, as well as liaising with the client.
Development work included upgrades to site functionality, such as adding multilingual fields to existing MCMS Templates, and extending the multilingual functionality to include the site navigation structure, as featured in the Herbert Smith Paris Recruitment Site.
I was also responsible for the general maintenance and general wellbeing of the site, which included bugfixing and applying patches to the site. To aid this, we created an automated build script, to automatically pull our source code from source control, compile it, and deploy it, so that the deployment was streamlined. This later become the standard for all of our current deployments.
My work with this client also involved training our staff in how MCMS works, and best practices when QAing sites.
The Halfords Order system was unceremoniously dropped onto my lap, after having the only person in the building knowing anything about the site left the company. The documentation was sparse and usually out of date, the code was worse. The site was not functioning properly on the live systems, and the clients were logging issues with the system faster than we could address them.
Within 6 weeks of delving into the ageing code, I tore apart the code and the live infrastructure, and started documenting the business process used for this client. Improvements were added such as advanced javascript to automate bar code scanning, and integration with Royal Mail and DHL to give additional useful details to clients.
I was given additional tasks of training other staff in proper QA procedure for this site, as well as creating self contained Virtual PC Images, so that sites could be developed and tested on, without impact on live systems (printing functionality is one main important part of their systems)
At the end of my main "work" on this client, we have gone from over 40 issues logged on our bug tracker, to 2, with excellent customer satisfaction.
Toys R Us wanted to provide more than just "standard delivery" options to their clients. They wanted more than just "Standard" and "Express" delivery - they wanted to give the ability to the client to choose which day they wanted their package to arrive on.
A main requirement was the ability to change the rules for the "Delivery Engine", which determines, based on when the product was ordered, its size, weight, availability and value, will be able to tell the client when the package will be delivered, and additional pricing information.
Behind the scenes, the engine uses a complex database of shipping providers, to determine which provider to use, based on the above information, and also shipper-specific information such as response time for courier, notification period required for package, and if they do Saturday Delivery.
Toys R Us' fulfilment provider, at this time, could only handle 300 "premium" orders, so I had to add the functionality to limit the amount of orders going through.
Monty took an extremely complex task and managed to produce a simple and elegant solution that met all the business requirements. What’s more, as the client’s requirements have changed and grown over time his rules engine has scaled effortlessly.
Roger Thornham, Project Manager, Toys R Us
IBML approached us, asking us to create them a site, where they can effectively manage their web based brand management site, granting certain users access only to brands they have paid for.
They wanted a Microsoft CMS 2002 solution, enabling them to very easily change the content on their site, and manage who had rights to do alterations. They also wanted one custom feature - to limit access to certain postings depending on who the client is - if they have paid for the posting.
After the initial site creation phase, there were numerous tweaks to the site, mainly content and site structure tweaks, to get the site looking professional.
The site is currently awaiting client approval to go live.