Developer Training

In 2007 Comverse required a bit of help with the training of a junior programmer.

I personally helped one of the junior developers build out a file synchronization tool. This involved daily mentoring sessions, code reviews, and paired programming sessions. This was extremely fulfilling as the developer was really inexperienced and was basically forced to sink or swim on their own. This project went on for a few months and by the end of the time the developer was comfortable with continuing on with the development of this tool on their own.

Comverse Integration

In 2006 Comverse asked us to help with the systems integration of their latest product acquisition.

Comverse had just acquired another company at the time and was trying to integrate their front-end into the existing back-end.

This project consisted of building a J2EE framework. I looked at this as seeing how the other half lived. We were able to pick J2EE up pretty quickly as it had a lot of parallels with the .NET world. My task was to put together patterns and practices for extensibility models for their next-gen product. This included learning swing, spring, java beans, etc.

Our contribution was a proof of concept showing various patterns to use for extensibility.

Real Time Billing Software – Next Gen

In 2005 Comverse asked us to help design and implement the next generation of their product line.

We were tasked with helping the staff figure out how to make their entire existing product line extensible. The goal was to simplify onboarding of new customers that had specific requirements outside of the core framework. The extensible points in the existing product ranged from embedded SQL in C++ projects, web services, GUI clients, Oracle stored procedures and tables, along with various build, package, and deployment processes.

We developed a meta-data model to represent all the extension points and hooks and by running a custom code generation tool we would build all the stubs for the extensibility pieces during a build process.

Various technologies were used hereā€¦ C++, PL/SQL, VB.NET, HTML, etc.

Real Time Billing Software

In 2005 Comverse asked us to help maintain their current set of real time billing webservices.

To cut our teeth we were tasked with maintenance of the current real-time billing web services backend. We basically just had to fix existing bugs. I believe we were able to start coding and contributing the very first day on site and continued cleaning everything up over a 2 month period.

Since we were in maintenance mode we were not able to create anything new but we were able to stabilize their existing system, provide more code coverage in unit tests, and decrease the overall number of issues they were tracking.

The existing application was vb.net with an Oracle backend. This was our first foray into vb.net having come from a primarily C# background. Was basically the same good ole .NET framework with a different syntax.