My team does HTML and client scripting, but focuses a bit more on CMS integration and server-side code. I am not strong in graphic design or UI design - implementation is what I do. (If you take a look at feldentertainment.com you will be happy to know that we do not claim ownership of the content or style of that site.)
In all of the jobs I have held, I have been known for quickly making a mark and being surprisingly productive. Here is one fun example:
Years ago I had a few months before I would begin college, so I got a job through a temp agency and was sent to Air BP (the jet fuel division of BP Amoco) to do some very mundane billing processing. On the morning of my first day, they trained me to perform bill cancellation and re-entry, a manual process I was to perform over and over all day long. Once I understood the process, I hesitantly told them I knew of a way to speed it up with some computer code to automate the process. They were receptive to my idea, and by the end of the day I was programming. I soon had four different computers running my scripts at once, processing orders five to ten times faster than I ever could manually, making my management and the temp agency quite happy. With my help, they were able to make a big dent in their accounts receivable backlog to the tune of tens of millions of dollars! When I finally left for college, the office threw me a party and gave me a replica airplane - making for quite a fond memory.More recently, I was promoted to Web Architect at Feld. At my performance review several months later, I was told, "We had high expectations for you as Web Architect, and you have exceeded them." My managers have said in my reviews things such as
- Carl is clearly the most technically competent member of the Event Systems group. He is the visionary for the technical direction of the Feld web team and its projects. His expertise and his ideas have been invaluable during the planning and execution of the data center move and public web site mitigation.
- Carl is a consumate professional. He can [be] counted [on] to get things done - properly and on time.
- Carl takes great pride in his position, his accomplishments, and the accomplishments of the web team – as well he should. I rely on his decisions and his judgment and he has not let me down. Rarely do I have to adjust his course.
Some of what I've done at Feld
In over seven years of building tools and refining our environment, I have set up quite a system for hosting and maintaining our web sites. I designed and built most of our setup and tools. Even before I became the Web Architect, I generally took the lead in this.The main factor driving many of these investments on the Web Team is the sheer number of sites to manage. When I began at Feld, we had about five web sites (Feld Entertainment, Ringling, Intranet, Circus Fit, and Elephant Center) and four developers. But for several years while we added web sites and expanded our responsibilities, we had only three developers. Depending on how you count them, we have one to three dozen web sites now. These vary among:
- Content-heavy sites (Monster Jam)
- Line-of-business applications (Feld Intranet, with many different data forms and unrelated sections)
- A Silverlight-based distributed application with components in several offices (Media Files)
- Simple HTML sites, sometimes even single pages
- 36 web sites set up in IIS
- 13 production Ektron CMS sites (excluding test / demo sites)
- 20 sub-applications
- 5 mobile sites and 9 country-specific sites (mobile.ringling.com, www.feldentertainment.co.uk, etc.)
- 5 significant console or class library projects (including our main library, Feld Enterprise Library, with dozens of classes)
- 7 custom windows services
- 800 domain names to manage, most of which redirect to canonical domain names via our tools
(The sync is an Ektron database sync with the file system portion replaced with our own solution based on Microsoft Web Deploy. A custom windows service monitors and manages all of this.)
Having things organized like this is the only way to manage so many web sites with such a small team.
Management and Visibility
All web sites automatically load a number of custom HTTP Modules from our enterprise library. Among the most important of these are modules that provide management tools and error logging to give us control of our sites and visibility into what is happening.All web sites automatically have a virtual or hybrid virtual/physical admin page:
All sites also log exceptions to a database through a queue-based, fault-tolerant system:
Development and Deployment
We have set up a wildcard DNS entry on our network so that, without using the hosts file, we can develop and debug our web sites locally using a custom TLD (for example, www.ringling.localhost). We do not precompile the web sites—deployment is simply a matter of copying the files to the servers using a custom Visual Studio package that I wrote, either via keyboard shortcut or context menu:
All deployments are logged to an auditing database.
Among the many features of our enterprise library are mechanisms for caching (persistence):
We also built a Common Data Store repository with an API, so that we could avoid making simple one-off databases:
Each web site or application can have a walled-off space within the data store to keep track of its own data.
Content Delivery Network and Image Resizing
One of our HTTP modules provides on-the-fly image resizing via query string:http://www.monsterjam.com/images/logos/PathofDestruction.png?maxw=150
This can save client bandwidth and ensure that images fit in the appropriate spaces. Rather than implement a caching mechanism for this, we reference the images (or any assets) via Amazon CloudFront CDN:
http://monsterjam.feldcdn.com/images/logos/PathofDestruction.png?maxw=150
Once the CDN is set up for a site and image references are set to use the CDN, it is essentially zero-maintenance. The site can be set to switch between CDN and direct mode via a config setting.
The CDN enables us to offload a large majority of our network traffic and free up server resources at a minor expense.
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