Latest Project: NADEX Website

This project certainly had some challenges, all of which were not surprising considering that the project was the first public-facing website (consisting of many additional dependencies) to use the new CMS, and the deadline was tight and had to be met in time. I have noted the following list of challenges:

• The redevelopment of this website had to be achieved by 1 February. This meant that we only had approximately two months to spend for development tasks.
  
• To meet the tight mid-week deadline, we had to break from some internal processes. Typically, releases are completed at weekends, and code was being redeveloped until two weeks before the go-live date, and bugs were being fixed up until the go-live date.
  
• Many environment and infrastructure issues needed to be addressed, and new environments needed to be built. This was the first time that the new CMS was used for a public-facing website.
  
• Other web-based applications use files that exist under the domain, and it was not always clear where the files were being used. These files, HTML pages, and links needed to be migrated and approprite RewriteRules needed to be written so that the changes would not affect these other web-based systems.
• A new brand and designs for the website were being created at the same time, and the branding was received half-way through the design process. (Due to the tight deadline, designs had to be started before a new brand was created.) Additionally, the development process started at the same time as the designs were being created during the first two sprints. This, of course, meant that we needed to constantly make small changes to the CSS and HTML for design changes.
  
• The development for the project was achieved in approximately two months, including bug-fixing during the final two weeks, and some earlier development work needed to be tweaked as unfinished designs were evolved. (We certainly did work Agile.)

Despite the mentioned challenges, everyone did a fantastic effort, and I largely enjoyed it. Many disciplines (such as development, design, QA, content writers, system developers, etc) worked well together to ensure the success of the project. 

With such a project, the low points were working long hours over the Christmas and New Year weeks while colleagues and most of the company were on holiday, working through most of my lunches throughout the past three months, and ensuring that the dependent systems were seemingly unaffected by the changes. The highs were speaking to the clients and being involved at a high level, developing new components in the CMS using Java, and working together toward a common goal to launch a complete website. Now that this project is finished, I think some sort of recovery is in order.