Wellspring is a company in the tech transfer industry. My team worked on one of its flagship product, an IP management SaaS app called Sophia. As a developer, I worked with the team on the engineering of Sophia with its very complex custom PHP framework. With over 300 clients, we had to develop to each client’s specifications without interfering with other clients’ installations. (Essentially, there are 300 different versions of Sophia, each customized to the clients’ requests.) I had to work with client services and our B.A. to discuss challenging and often vague and unclear specifications from the client – which happened more often than not.

For nearly ten years, I was a software engineer working on Pizza Hut’s food ordering site. At first this was as part of a company called QuikOrder, which was later sold to Pizza Hut, who formed a new technology company called Pizza Hut Connect. Obviously we had to make changes to the site as necessary, like adding functionality to handle new limited-time offers and managing the CMS (ExpressionEngine) to add new products (and related functionality). But we were also constantly looking for ways to streamline the site, including removing ExpressionEngine from the site’s functionality and relegating it to being nothing more than a content management system, monitoring Kibana to see what errors and warnings were being thrown and fixing what was causing those errors and warnings, upgrading to newer versions of PHP and fixing the resulting exceptions that came as a result, and refactoring the site to take advantage of AngularJS.

Rich Escaller reached out to me about his small business’s web site, wanting to add new features to it and improve the SEO. After he gave me the proper access to the hosting provider and the codebase, I found that the existing site had been developed with severely outdated HTML coding standards and was just plain horrible to look at. I basically re-built the site completely, with better HTML and CSS standards and using PHP and JavaScript to enhance the functionality. Among the features I added at Rich’s request include a “What I Learned Today” section, in which Rich could write what was essentially a blog entry offering DIY handyman tips, and a “Used Tools For Sale” section, complete with shopping cart functionality. To accommodate those features I also designed a mini-CMS that Rich could use to enter the details.

One day Rich called me and said that his customers were reporting that they weren’t able to access his site. I immediately opened a web browser and found that loaded without a problem for me. I called a few acquaintances and asked them to try to access his site. It turned out that some of them indeed were unable to get to the site, with their browsers giving them a never-ending busy icon. After some testing and further investigating, I found that those who couldn’t access the site had one thing in common: their ISP was AT&T. So Rich called AT&T to ask about that, but they said it was the fault of 1and1.com, his hosting provider. When he called 1and1, they blamed AT&T. Well, i was getting tired of the finger-pointing, so I tried writing to the Chicago Tribune to see if the media might help. A reporter from the Tribune called AT&T. and lo and behold, upon talking to the media, AT&T found that there was a blocker erroneously placed on his site and removed it. And as a courtesy, 1and1.com gave Rich a few months of free service. I was happy not only to help get Rich’s web site back online to AT&T customers (not to mention the relief that the problem wasn’t my fault), but also that he got some exposure in the Chicago Tribune.