As part of the development team I was responsible for the following:

1. Designed the general user-interface for the application ensuring team members adhered to the design principles.
2. Developed the needs requirements and specifications for the application with the client.
3. Developed the third version of the reporting tool, adding features such as date-range reporting, multiple report summations, additional report filters and performance enhancements.
4. Developed the Transfers Office module, which allowed staff to track intradistrict and interdistrict transfers, transfer reasons, transfer statuses and much more.  Reporting tools were also extended to report on Transfer Office specific information.

Report Editing Screen

Allowed administrators to create highly configurable reports, specifying report parameter, grouping options, column selection, column sorting (via drag-and-drop) and much more.

Student Application Form

The Student Application Form was designed for quick keyboard navigation.  ExtJS was used for combo boxes and other various input elements to improve speed of data entry.

Transfers Office System

The transfers office system allowed faculty to quickly find students based on a number of criteria. The transfer system used color coding on records to indicate accepting students in green, due for processing in yellow and red for overdue for processing.

My favorite booth on the floor happened to be oDesk, their website oDesk.com is the best designed and most well engineered contractor website.  I’ve looked at dozens of work-for-hire websites such as Guru.com, eLance.com, Sologig.com, GetACoder.com and many others, but by far I would recommend oDesk over the others.   Two reasons primarily, first they have a guaranteed payment for work policy, backed by a computer monitoring program that makes sure you’re not goofing off, if you are, you scrub the goof off time and you get paid fairly for work you’ve accomplished.   Secondly,  they have buyers payment information, so they act as the escrow service to make sure you’re paid as the contractor.  Lastly I really like that they make providers take tests in their competency areas, that prevents anyone from saying they can do web or application development.

eBay demonstrated their Selling Manager Applications API, I thought it was a cool demonstration and they did a good job of trying to evangelize their platform.  One thing, though, I was having a hard time with was coming up with something new on the eBay platform, seems like eBay has a lot covered already.

Microsoft showed off many things at their booth, I was surprised they didn’t focus more on Silverlight at their booth, they had Silverlight there, but the Microsoft Surface centerpiece kind of overshadowed everything else at their booth.   I think Silverlight is an extremely impressive set of technologies, I like what Microsoft has done, although I’m a bit upset they removed PowerPC support in their 2.0 release.   The list of available controls and the user-interfaces that were demonstrated with this shows that it’s a solid competitor to the Flash platform.  I also like the fact that the Linux community is on top of porting the platform via the Mono’s Moonlight project.

Adobe was pushing the Flex framework and Flash platform at their booth.  They also demonstrated at one of the sessions the new Catalyst development tool which I think competes directly with Microsoft’s Expression Blend.  This IDE lets Flex developers build rich user-interfaces from resources imported directly from Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.  Supposedly giving more control of the UI design to the designers while allowing developers to code the application together.  I’m not sure how it compares yet to Expression Blend, but I have a feeling Expression Blend still has the leg up on Adobe as it was built from the start as a user-interface design tool, where Catalyst merely imports UI elements from existing Adobe applications.

There was a lot to see but this years conference was definitly scaled-back, I later learned that many of the exhibitors from the prior years show ended up at the MySQL Conference held just shortly after this one.   I think due to the economy many companies also didn’t bother having a booth,  such as Etelos, which had a giant booth last year, then some companies simply vanished, one of my favorites from last year was Coghead.  That about sums up my floor experience of the expo, I hope in future posts to go into more depth about the various work-for-hire sites out there such as oDesk!

As part of the development team for the application (called the Production Incentive Program Administrative Assistant) I was responsible for development, user-interface design, debugging and testing.

Key highlights of my contributions included:

1. Developed the initial user-interface mock ups for most aspects of the application.  Assisted other developers in tweaking their user-interfaces to best adhere to the design principles.
2. Developed the Vesting module that reports individual vesting on a real-time basis.
3. Developed in conjunction with other developers several new incentive plan types with the system.
4. Developed the Arbitrary Units module, which allowed the admin to define arbitrary plan units such as Dollars, Euro, Cars, Widgets, etc for the teared bonus plans.
5. I was the lead quality assurance engineer, making sure all functionality, reports and screens functioned to the clients specifications.

Incentive Plan Editing Screen

Administrators can implement several different plan types with this highly configurable plan editing screen.   Option include pure bonus plans, plans based on a percentage, plans based on a tiered production and more.

Contribution Screen

The contribution screen was designed to be a fast data-entry screen for administrators.  The screen supports Excel style data entry which is immediately saved via Ajax to the database.   Billing summaries are also available for the given time period.

As part of the development team my contributions included:

1. Developed the specifications and contributed to the overall design goals of the project.
2. Helped develop the versioning and rollback functionality.
3. Improved functionality to the Edit-In-Place feature, adding multi-lingual capabilities.
4. Developed the first websites to use the CMS as a testing ground to iron out bugs and weak areas of the program.