From a coding standpoint, my proudest moment is something that probably doesn't even get properly updated anymore.
Years ago I worked for an insurance company that spent a ton of money on 3rd party vendor products to make our client's lives easier. Know all the fancy stuff esurance and Progressive have to let you buy and modify policies? Most of that is web front ends for mainframe-backed rating systems. While our company had a full development staff for both the web and the mainframe, we only had so much time so we delegated a lot of things to expensive enterprise vendors.
In insurance, the last thing you want to do is look antiquated, especially in car insurance. There's such a razor thin profit margin you can't get away with being phone-based or paper-based, nor can you get away with no phone tree as a selling point (when you called, you chose only your department. After that, a live human took care of you). So we had to get an online quoter/editor for our auto policies ASAP.
When I joined the company, they were already two years past-due. By the time I left four and a half years later, we were still only 80% away from a finished product, because they were on version 3 at that point, with version 1 and 2 never being 100% complete.
While the whole auto mess was going on, we decided to build an in-house quoter and editor for our small business insurance line in PHP. My coworker and myself were well versed in Zend Framework 1 and PHP in general, and we had a helpful staff of AS/400 programmers to help us with the linkage. We quoted 6 months to get the entire thing done and out the door, and for much less than the 7 figures that had already been spent on the auto product we were "buying."
We got it done in 7 months. Since our expenses were basically manpower, we finished the project for probably under $100k (almost all of it payroll, and then two Zend Server licenses). We implemented basically everything the small business underwriters wanted, and our change process was in the span of days for new features and bug fixes instead of weeks like with the auto.
Not only was I proud that we got it done, everyone was happy with it. It was another thing I could use as leverage to get rid of the crappy auto vendor we were bleeding money into.
That was nearly 5 years ago now though, and the company I worked for was eventually bought out and had a leadership change. They no longer use PHP but instead use some weird proprietary hybrid language that's based on Javascript. The agent login page is still the same ZF1 application, and it's been moved to a Windows server still running PHP 5.3.
I'm not even sure if that quoter system is still up since I no longer have access, but I doubt it's in good shape, which makes me sad.
From a coding standpoint, my proudest moment is something that probably doesn't even get properly updated anymore.
Years ago I worked for an insurance company that spent a ton of money on 3rd party vendor products to make our client's lives easier. Know all the fancy stuff esurance and Progressive have to let you buy and modify policies? Most of that is web front ends for mainframe-backed rating systems. While our company had a full development staff for both the web and the mainframe, we only had so much time so we delegated a lot of things to expensive enterprise vendors.
In insurance, the last thing you want to do is look antiquated, especially in car insurance. There's such a razor thin profit margin you can't get away with being phone-based or paper-based, nor can you get away with no phone tree as a selling point (when you called, you chose only your department. After that, a live human took care of you). So we had to get an online quoter/editor for our auto policies ASAP.
When I joined the company, they were already two years past-due. By the time I left four and a half years later, we were still only 80% away from a finished product, because they were on version 3 at that point, with version 1 and 2 never being 100% complete.
While the whole auto mess was going on, we decided to build an in-house quoter and editor for our small business insurance line in PHP. My coworker and myself were well versed in Zend Framework 1 and PHP in general, and we had a helpful staff of AS/400 programmers to help us with the linkage. We quoted 6 months to get the entire thing done and out the door, and for much less than the 7 figures that had already been spent on the auto product we were "buying."
We got it done in 7 months. Since our expenses were basically manpower, we finished the project for probably under $100k (almost all of it payroll, and then two Zend Server licenses). We implemented basically everything the small business underwriters wanted, and our change process was in the span of days for new features and bug fixes instead of weeks like with the auto.
Not only was I proud that we got it done, everyone was happy with it. It was another thing I could use as leverage to get rid of the crappy auto vendor we were bleeding money into.
That was nearly 5 years ago now though, and the company I worked for was eventually bought out and had a leadership change. They no longer use PHP but instead use some weird proprietary hybrid language that's based on Javascript. The agent login page is still the same ZF1 application, and it's been moved to a Windows server still running PHP 5.3.
I'm not even sure if that quoter system is still up since I no longer have access, but I doubt it's in good shape, which makes me sad.