Doing What I Do Best

Over the course of my career, I have had the good fortune to have worked on more than two dozen different software development projects for almost a dozen different companies. (Of course, some of those projects have been more enjoyable than others.)

I thought it would be worthwhile to list my top two or three favourite projects and talk about what I did and why they were special for me. This list is in no particular order.

* Ministry of Health, Water Testing Information System (WTIS) project
This was a VB 6 application, that help the public laboratories in Ontario process water testing results. It automatically notifies the public health authorities in the province when bad water results are discovered. This application replaces what formerly was a paper-based process, and ensures that people with contaminated water on their properties are notified in only a few days instead of a matter of weeks.

I was the main developer of this application, and was able to deliver three releases of the software in 1 year. I also spent time transferring some of my skills and knowledge on proper VB6 and SQL Server development to the full-time employees on the team, so that they could continue to enhance the application after I had left.

All in all, this was a highly satisfying job. Not only did I work with some extraordinary people, the team was well-organized and the department manager was definitely concerned with providing good opportunities for learning to his staff. If I was interested in full-time employment at that time, I would have definitely wanted to stay.

* Petro-Canada Inc., Distributed Transaction System (DTS)
This was my first full-time job after university, and I was there for nearly 5 years. For who I was (a kid right out of school) I was given a remarkable amount of resposibility - and I loved it. During my time there, I developed a distributed multi-tier componentized application that mainly dealt with recording sales of products to major competitors.

My application communicated with systems from Imperial Oil (Esso), Sunoco, Husky and a few others. I was entirely responsible for the design, development, implementation, and support of this application which was installed on 12 servers in cities across Canada. I got to travel a little bit (which I love), worked to solve real customers problems, and saved my employer a ton of money by improving the time required to send out invoices. What was formerly a paper-based process that could take weeks to reconcile the sales between disconnected systems, became highly-automated so that billing could commence on the same day a sale is made.

Given that 12 years later I am still basically doing the same thing (improving communication between disconnected systems), it's quite impressive (to me at least) how successful the DTS project was.

* The Marketing Store, Dealer CRM Project
This is my current contract. The project has been to migrate almost 100 car dealers from using an old version of a CRM tool to a new version. This involved quite extensive customization of the new CRM to meet the needs of the manufacturer, and the data migration issues (ensuring a flawless migration) have been a definite challenge.

I was the lead developer of the migration project, working with two other developers. It involved a lot of .NET development (in both C# and VB.NET), and SQL Server coding. I then moved on to another project that involved designing a bunch of web services to provide access to our database to an outside vendor.

Basically, this contract has been a blast. I love the people I work with, and I also love the attitude of the entire company. It's a fun place to work. I have also been challenged with complex problems and new technology, and that is fun as well.