I started with Climate Change Central in May 2010. I was brought on as a developer and to start on a project for processing rebate cheques for commercial users. The brand new team was put together and an agile process was enforced. While that was 8 months of learning of the business needs, development in Zend, and team building, there was a drastic change in direction for the better. They wanted to adjust their direction towards more engagement than just providing rebates. This is great but requires a whole overhaul of the coding structure. I played the lead architect in designing the system. We switched the code base to .NET and more open programming. Check out their sites and see the change as it becomes available.
Project 1:Trucks of Tomorrow
The first project was a commercial trucking incentive program. So if you bought a trailer skirt or some other approved effiency upgrade the Government of Alberta would give you a rebate. The team designed and developed the entire project in a very tight timeline. The front end was separated from the database with a SOAP based web service. This was all written in PHP on a Zend Stack in Windows.
Truck and trailer operators could reserve the funds, upload their documents and submit claims. The processing team would then approve or reject the claim based on the documents provided. The approved claims then would be batched for payment.
Project 2: Light It Right
The commercial lighting project built on the commercial trucking process. It used similiar processing and document flow for the claiming. We added the requirement for assessors to assess the building before they could reserve funds for any lighting upgrades to their buildings.
Understanding different lights and energy saving were key to this project. Assessing the change in energy usage based on lighting fixtures can be complex and calculating requirements on savings and issuing rebates on quantity caused many problems. Most of the problems were caused by unclear requirements upfront.
In the end, we have a usable product and will distribute the millions of dollars of rebates.
Project 3: Reporting
This was a fun project for the development team as we got to do some pretty creative programming and branch into areas that we haven't been in for a long time or ever. With all the programs running there was no single way to view what was going on in the organization. We developed a reporting service that hooked into the legacy system and the commercial programs that were just finished. Using HighCharts for our pie, line, bar, and area charts we could plot the required reporting information and below it display the information in a sortable table. This project heavily used JQuery and open source reporting.
There was a requirement for visually representing the numbers based on location in Alberta and what electoral division it was in. Using SVG I developed a way to plot all the points of each division and colour code them based on the data provided. Plotting cities and adjusting the size of circles was also used to represent the data. This report used to take 3 people 4 days to compile and it would be months behind. Now the information is current and takes a few seconds to load.
- Links
- Environment:
- Started with:
- Team Size: 3 Developers, 1 Content Provider, 1 Manager
- Server Environment: Windows 2008 Server with IIS 7 and Zend Server
- Database: MS SQL 2005
- Development: Zend Studio
- Deployment: CruiseControl, VisualSVN, Custom scripts
- Currently:
- Team Size: 3 Developers, 1 User Experience Architect
- Server Environment: Windows 2008 Server with IIS
- Database: MS SQL 2005/2008
- Development: Visual Studio 2010
- Deployment: Team Foundation Server