Author: Anthony Bull

Categories
demand-side Frontend

Display Advertising

(Yahoo! : 1/10-5/10)

Galaxy is a component of Yahoo! Mail (one of the most complicated MVC apps in JavaScript on the planet) as part of Rushmore that enables consumption of events from both the Yahoo and Facebook networks without having to leave Mail. As part of the Tiger Team, I was brought in as a F2E to help meet deadlines by implementing features.

Results

  • Contributed to the most important RIA in the display advertising industry (at the time)
  • adding and testing front-end functionality in Yahoo Mail
  • ensuring cross-browser compatibility for IE 6/7/8 on XP Vista, Safari 4, and Firefox 2/3
  • helping to improve the team’s recruitment and hiring processes

 

Categories
crm eCommerce Frontend Growth NUX supply-side

Improving the Acquisition Funnel

(Shop It To Me : 2/10-5/10)

Our four-page flow has proven itself time and again, but in order to drive even more signups, I’ve put in experiments on

  • the number and styles of brands a user can choose from (step two)
  • the messaging (copy) and layout (throughout signup)
  • the types and number of mandatory sizes and categories a user must choose (step three)
  • the form fields of the profile creation (step four, final)
  • content and layout of the confirmation email received by the user
  • …and others

Below you’ll find just a sample of these kinds of experiments.

Here are three of the five variations on our final step, the profile page, in a bid to leverage the SSO benefits of FB Connect (click for larger views)

For one experiment in the signup process, we attempted to simplify choosing brands by creating style profiles. The idea was to make it easier for users to signup based on some curated indices (click for a larger view)

Here are a couple of the many landing-page variations we’ve tried when a potential new user is referred from a friend (click for larger view.)

In the following example, we have the original confirmation email as contrasted with a simple design (of my own) I implemented (design and implementation as email in one hour, click for larger assets/images.)

Results

  • Implemented several A/B tests that increased signup conversion by 3-10%
  • Refactored workflow engine while pairing to enable signup for alternative flows used in A/B testing
Categories
Frontend Full-Stack

RIA for Monitoring

(Yahoo! : 03/09-11/09)

To leverage my skills and experience from developing web apps for monitoring at the enterprise level, I joined a peer team which had been providing the service engineers of Yahoo with a white-box solution paired with Nagios.

In a bid to move away for the costly distributed model of federated service engineering, our team was tasked with providing a centralized enterprise solution. I contributed as a front-end engineer and implemented features in a custom Perl MVC framework.

Results

  • added RIA functionality to an enterprise monitoring-as-a-service replacement for Nagios
  • won a naming competiton for branding the product
Categories
Frontend Full-Stack SPAs

Experience Monitoring at Scale

(Yahoo! : 5/07-2/09)

Yahoo invests a lot of resources into making sure that each of its properties is available around the clock. To assist in that task, a centralized, black-box service was created as part of dev tools to help everyone from senior management to service engineers monitor and understand the health of properties.

On the backend, the service consists of the data store, a metrics collector, aggregation tools, and the configuration store (database-driven.) On the front end, there’s dashboarding, custom reports, and a self-service configuration tool.

Results

  • built and maintained web tools for a Nagios-based experience management solution checking 10,000+ URLs worldwide daily generating 63M measurements per month
  • reduced workload of system engineers by creating (from scratch) a web-based, MySQL-driven, MVC-architected, self-service configuration tool for creation of and management of Nagios checks
  • led SCRUM-influenced development and improved the quality of the team’s SE process by standardizing on championing the use of Catalyst (an MVC framework in Perl.) Improvements included shortened dev cycles, the introduction of TDD, improved performance, better documentation
  • created snappy, responsive interfaces using custom JavaScript along with YUI in conjunction with JSON-serving REST web services (Perl.) Also achieved performance gains through page-weight optimization
  • reduced development costs through the use of VMWare virtual machines for testing, building, and deploying as part of continuous integration. Implemented a packaged solution for automated regression testing using Firefox, Selenium, X, WWW::Mechanize
Categories
Backend demand-side Frontend Full-Stack SOA Troubleshooting

(Executive) Enterprise Dashboarding

(Yahoo! : 5/07-7/07)

An external consultant to the team had been brought in to develop an überdashboard to aggregate data from another project. The learning curve was steep and the consultant wasn’t familiar with the base data so his dashboard had some major shortcomings.

Results

  • Jumped in two weeks before release date, took ownership, and still delivered a web-based, executives’ dashboard solution for experience monitoring without the benefits of system documentation or tests
  • Reduced 74% page load-time through refactoring backend, improving database queries, introducing pagination for an 80 KLOC (LAMPerl) data warehousing web app
  • Discovered and remedied major data quality issues before going live
  • Radically improved the look and usability of the tool
Categories
demand-side Full-Stack Management Process supply-side

Groupware for Nuclear Resources

(IAEA : 8/06-9/06)

This web app – a customization of an Open Source .NET portal framework – accepts project requests from people around the world and handles the workflow.

Results

  • led award-winning dev team of 3 for custom, web-based Enterprise Project Management solution used by 3,500+ users; 2,600 unique visits per month
  • Reduced licensing costs through the use of the MVC-based, Open Source web content management system: DotNetNuke
  • Implemented standardized practices for software project documentation
  • Created integrated MS Office tools to halve the amount of data entry performed by support staff
  • Retooled the application to support Unicode (e.g. UTF-8)
  • Created a prototype (using SOAP web services) for Translation Management between line-of-business web applications
Categories
Backend demand-side Innovation Troubleshooting

Web-Based Document Management

(IAEA : 4/06-4/06)

We were charged with building an application to allow the customer to perform three essential tasks

  • upload documents (as PDFs) to the web
  • manage those same documents via a web-based interface
  • Apply business rules to the documents based on embedded properties (e.g. PDF XMP metadata)

The first version of the system has already allowed the customer to publish and manage 10 years worth of documents. The next 40 years of documents were to be uploaded as the customer’s schedule allowed.

Results

  • Delivered a Java-based document management system for managing 50 years of PDFs on-time after assuming project leadership when the Project Manager fell ill
  • Delivered a user-friendly custom solution for publishing PDFs directly to the web via the enterprise document management system
  • Managed the project to completion when the original Project Manager had to excuse himself during a crucial phase of the project
Categories
Analytics Database demand-side Frontend

Web-Based Data Warehousing Tool

(IAEA : 3/06-4/06)

The customer had been using static reports in the form of data cubes embedded in a VB 6.0 application. When he asked for a web-based way to view the information more dynamically, we chose OWC PivotTables as the way to go.

To realize the customer’s request, I created several cubes under MS Analysis Services and hooked them to PivotTables embedded in a web-page.

Results

  • Implemented a web-based, SQL Server-driven data warehousing solution for sales reporting using OLAP technology
  • Successfully upgraded customer’s reports one-for-one and gave customer greater insight on sales data
  • Created OLAP tools to pull and aggregate sales data on a daily basis
Categories
Analytics APIs Building buy-in Collaboration Full-Stack Process Prototyping supply-side

The Portal for Nuclear Information

(IAEA : 8/05-8/05)

At the end of 2004, the IAEA had well over 200 scientific and technical information resources (e.g. databases, websites, applications, etc.)

In order to reduce the effort to maintain these (saving time for graphic designers, software engineers, DBAs, and resource custodians alike,) a single portal was conceived and made a priority deliverable for the IT and MIS sections.

As the Lead Information Architect, I was responsible for gathering technical details about the resources, supporting the technical architect, and driving the design behind the user experience.

Results

  • led requirements gathering and implemented modular components for the authoritative web resource on scientific and technical nuclear information
  • Met with and built buy-in among information stakeholders
  • Abstracted the business processes of the organization to the 50,000 ft view
  • Utilized user-centered methods to inform the design of the portal
  • Implemented the beta version using OpenText, LiveLink, and Java APIs for each
Categories
Analytics Content Management demand-side Full-Stack Innovation

Multilingual Workflow Application

(IAEA : 8/03-10/03)

To more efficiently track internal publishing, the IT section created a custom workflow application in October of 2003. The application serves approximately 50 people all the way from editors to translators to printers to distributors.

Results

  • Worked with multi-lingual users to implement v2.0 of a translation workflow application
  • Gathered requirements after leading focus group sessions with users speaking Chinese, French, Russian, English, Spanish, Arabic
  • Migrated v1.0 data store from MS Access to SQL Server