Creditland

Creditland was created as an online credit marketplace, hooking consumers up with lenders (think Lending Tree.) The website features four types of credit products: credit cards, auto loans, home loans, and personal loans. I was originally hired by Creditland in April/May of 1999 as an independent contractor. I was a little bit leery of joining a startup, and was considering moving to Colorado later that year, so I didn't want to make a firm committment. After working there for awhile, though, I found the company to be a fun, energetic place, and one full of talented people from whom I could learn a lot. Apparently Creditland liked me too, because in August they made me an offer that was $15,000 higher than my asking salary!

I served as Lead Web Developer at Creditland, which meant that I headed up the JSP development team. At any given time, I managed anywhere between two and ten other developers. Of course, I spent the majority of my time developing as well. I was responsible for developing the templates and architecture, as well as much of the code itself, for the various product sections. My responsibility included developing the JSP template architecture, creating the JavaBeans used by the JSPs, and developing the occasional Enterprise Java Bean. Some of the PL/SQL work was also in my jurisdiction. So was liberal use of JavaScript (although I made it a rule that no critical components of the website would rely on JavaScript since, well, the website was essentially the company's product offering, and we didn't want JavaScript to be a barrier to any potential customers, no matter how small the percentage might have been.)

The first section I developed was the credit card section. Challenges with that section included developing a search mechanism to help users choose credit cards, and simplifying a necessarily-long application process. With the help of my team, I completed this section and used it as a model for the other sections.
(Somewhat blurry screen shot of credit card homepage, featuring search criteria entry form on the left).
(Somewhat blurry screen shot of credit card search results screen).

Years before joining Creditland, I had honed my Web design skills through both classes and experience. These skills became very useful at Creditland, especially after our in-house designer was let go near the end of 1999. The entire company was battling over the look and feel of the Web site. Designs were proposed by various groups, including the soon-to-be-let-go designer as well as Creditland advertising agency. None of the designs worked to everyone's satisfaction. So Creditland's CIO asked me to develop and present a design for the site. In response, I documented all of the internal requirements for the site's look and feel. Number one was that it had to be non-intimidating and friendly, because at this point consumers were still a little shaky about perform online financial transactions. But it still needed to be professional, as Creditland was courting financial institutions as much as end-users. I then gathered up all available resources, including the corporate logo and fonts created by the ad agency, a series of illustration that my department had commissioned from an illustrator in Seattle, and set to work. I completed the concept and templates over the course of a weekend. By Monday, I had achieved what had thus far never been achieved in the company: unanimous agreement on the site's look and feel.
(Somewhat blurry screen shot of homepage).

I was hired as a developer, not a sys admin (and we certainly had talented sys admins at Creditland.) Yet my job responsibilities sometimes spilled over into that area. I became responsible to the development environments of all of the web developers there. These environments originally consisted of development instances of BEA's Weblogic; we later switched to using Orion for development and testing.

Another thing that moved under my jurisdiction was a re-write of the architecture, particularly the JSPs and JavaBeans. I'll admit that Java Server Pages were brand new when we started using them, and we weren't quite sure how to make the most effective use of them. Originally, we designed them much in the same way that Active Server Pages or PHP are used; that is, intermixing a bunch of business logic with our HTML. With the help of an outside contractor, we quickly developed a JSP framework--employing the Model-View-Controller design pattern--which greatly simplified the development and maintenance of Creditland's online applications. Since then, I've refined parts of that process to develop even more efficient frameworks for later projects.

Creditland.com was hosted on Sun Solaris servers on the BEA Weblogic application server and Apache Web server. Development environments consisted of Linux servers running either Weblogic or the Orion application server.

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