Helped BBC and a Flash design/development company work together to produce a site with a mixture of HTML and Flash interfacing with database-driven authentication and personalisation services and a data analysis/aggregation service. Work included design/howto documentation with AS3 snippets, briefings for both developer teams and documentation for long-term maintenance.
Developed a set of AS3 libraries to interface flash apps with 15 re-usable server-side applications and flash \"bridge\" with a javascript API to allow uploads with progress feedback to take place in HTML/JS/AJAX-based web pages and applications.
API design and test-driven development of highscores remoting library and XML data structure mapping library in Actionscript 2. HTML documentation of APIs and code examples provided for design agency to use to implement flash games. Sample flash applications provided to demo APIs and as utilities for use by technical project manager.
Performed an analysis of site traffic and wrote a site optimisation plan which included search engine optimisation, promotion and usability improvements. Prepared and chaired a meeting each month for team to keep up momentum and review progress over a 6 month period. Improved search engine penetration significantly and increased traffic from Google Images by an order of magnitude.
Documented the bbc.co.uk web infrastructure and development environment for 3rd-party developers. Also conducted an audit of tools available in development environment, installed additional development tools, specced out tasks for sysadmins to install system updates and produced a report on how environment can be be improved further.
Award-winning site allowing children to upload films then tag, rate and comment on them. Responsible for managing all technical aspects of the project: requirements analysis, solutions design, risk management, finding/managing freelance resources, writing technical briefs and managing technical relationship with design agency, troubleshooting and debugging. Responsible for developing JS and AS libraries and sample code for design agency to use. Also responsible for developing moderation screens using AJAX to interface with BBC backoffice systems.
Build of a database-driven site with a complex (translucent, stretchy) design. Built a mapping interface using Google Maps and javascript including various clustering and filtering algorithms. Devised a system of URL rewrite rules to create snappy search-engine navigable URLs for all dynamically-generated content. Created DHTML widgets for tabs, menus, lightboxes etc with graceful degradation for users without javascript or with old browsers.
Worked with editorial team to flesh out a functional spec for a site where users can collaboratively author and illustrate cookbooks and participate in themed discussions. Proposed a range of possible technical solutions and worked with inhouse technical team to arrive at resource estimates. Provided an analysis of risks, mitigation strategies and options for phased delivery.
Worked closely with the editorial team to pull together a prioritised list of features for the next 2 years and flesh out details of functionality. Designed technical solutions and worked out resource estimates with in-house tech team for the prioritised features. Created a project plan which included a detailed analysis of interdependencies for technical work as well as dependencies on editorial and graphic design work.
Design and build of an AJAX CMS solution. Worked closely with editorial team using prototyping to tease out requirements and establish data model. Provided an iterative build of the user interface and integration with in-house server-side components and javascript libraries (feeding back improvements to both).
Reviewed tenders for a database-driven website from potential suppliers and provided a technical assessment of the solutions proposed. Identified high risk areas of the project and suggested questions to probe suppliers experience in these areas.
Created a biological taxonomy for the UK wildlife CMS. This involved: reverse-engineering an XML data dump from the BBC Natural History Unit library system; writing perl scripts+libraries to ingest information, lookup taxonomic information in internet resources and export as relational data; deducing rules to add metadata based on conventions used by librarians in entering free-text values; liasing with library staff to feed back corrections of errors in the data and bugs in the XML export process.
Design of a framework for online mass participative experiments. This involved an audit of the features and shortcomings of previous projects, and a budget analysis to identify ways to reduce the cost and effort of creating new experiments. A technical solution was then designed, costed and options for phasing were identified.
Devised a system for automated allocation of points to users. Previously this was a manual task occupying an editorial staff member full time. This involved writing a javascript client class to interface with the BBC personalisation system and integrating this into the BBC jstools library.
Also replaced popups with lightboxes throughout the site (including within flash movies) as many users with popup-blocking software were experiencing problems.
Designed and implementated a reusable family of client classes for interfacing with bbc.co.uk server-side applications (using XML or JSON over HTTP). Each of the classes has unit tests, API documentation in NaturalDocs published as HTML and an example application. The libraries have formed the foundations of sites such as MyCBBC.
