Situation
SGI was launching a new line of Intel-based Windows workstations, the Visual Workstation 320 and 540, plus a new flat-panel LCD monitor. It needed an e-commerce site to sell them, including a configurator that let buyers customize CPU, memory and storage. Two outside firms had worked on the site for months and the launch date was at risk. The configurator depended on a third-party engine with performance and reliability problems.
Objective
Save the launch date: deliver a working e-commerce site and configurator in about six weeks, working with two SGI managers and one developer.
Approach
- Assessed what was there. I reviewed the existing codebase to understand what it was built on: Java, Oracle and BEA WebLogic.
- Planned around the critical gaps. There was no real user authentication, no order collection after the configurator, and every catalog page was rendered dynamically on every request. We built an aggressive plan around those three gaps.
- Built the core. I took on the CI/CD process and a large share of the core coding alongside the staff developer. I built a system to pre-render all catalog pages ahead of time and composite them with CSS and JavaScript where dynamic pieces were needed, and integrated the web front end cleanly with the Java/RMI middleware and the backend database.
- Built the team. When SGI wanted dedicated QA, I brought in someone new to the field and trained her on the core tenets of quality assurance; she interviewed in and joined the contract. When SGI wanted a dedicated server admin and CI/CD engineer, I brought in and coached someone I knew. I went from solo consultant to leading a four-person onsite team.
Net results
- Went live on schedule.
- Page load times dropped from as much as thirty seconds to under one.
- Publishing an updated site, with freshly rendered pages and elements, became a push-button CI/CD operation.
- The web-to-middleware-to-database integration work here shaped the idea behind Axis, a cleaner way to move data between systems over plain web protocols and XML, which this consulting income funded. The Arsenal / Axis entry has the rest.
Takeaway: in an at-risk project, the real problem is often not the obvious technical one.
Scope and technologies
Java with RMI middleware, Oracle, BEA WebLogic; a pre-rendering and compositing approach to catalog performance; CSS and JavaScript for dynamic composition; an early CI/CD build-and-publish pipeline; and integration across the web, middleware and database tiers.