Windows NT

Progressive had two sites for Direct Auto Quoting - one used by customers at home and the other used by our call-center reps. Given the complex state-by-state variance in the insurance laws, this made for a huge maintenance cost, and doing it twice in two codebases didn't make sense.

The premise was that a single web 2.0 Direct Quoting Application could replace these while also yielding a much more modern and customer-delighting application.

As the team's Actionscript expert, I joined and quickly helped out delivering feature after feature, and I loved the XP discipline and grew to appreciate TDD especially after the site started hitting performance problems that warranted significant refactors, which would have been much riskier without test coverage!

Our pilot included 14 of the 50 states, and was a complete success. However, the amount of clientside rules and assets started slowing the app down, and this was when I was asked to replace the REF framework that preceded my joining, with something much faster and more developer friendly. This led to my promotion to lead engineer, where I begun work on REF 2.0 (UI Framework)

We went through several iterations of the website, but our goals were SEO optimization and systematizing the internal booking process with salesforce while exposing certain information about entertainers, acts and availability through the website, and keeping those in sync with entertainer calendars.

With the help of some interns, I designed and built the website from the ground up, and hosted it at Cleveweb.com, the software solutions company I had formed a few years earlier.

At the time, dialup was still the most prevalent form of connecting to the internet, and our users had 28.8k, 26k and 56k modems, running PPP protocol, and some of them had static IPs whereas others used DHCP to assign connection-session long settings.

Users had Linux home directories, FTP accounts, and the option to host apache based vhosts. My job was to be able to leverage our support base and my growing knowledge of the protocols and technology to do Root Cause Analysis and solve their problems. I always took pride in my job and went above and beyond to provide the best Customer Service