Rogers

During the time period of 2003 – 2008 I did a lot of contract work for Rogers Wireless. It started off as some menial Microsoft Access development, but eventually ended up being all web-based development. This is actually where I picked up most of my PHP know-how. When the web development projects started up the department I was working for didn’t have much in the way of a budget for tools, so I used whatever was free: The LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack.

The first several applications I worked on were nothing special, but in the end I had created an entire Object Oriented framework for building any application on. It was quite a wonderful thing, based on templates and significant use of AJAX. Why not use an existing framework, such as the Zend Framework or PHPCake you might ask? Well, the truth is that when I started working on these projects these frameworks either didn’t exist, or were in their infancy. In all honesty, I have to give a lot of credit to this work. I wouldn’t be the developer I am today without this giant project, and many of the lessons I learned during it will stay with me forever!

In the end I had developed a whole suite of web applications including, but not limited to, the following:

• Online Safety Training
• Asset Inventory and Tracking
• Contractor Timesheets
• Training Calendar and Reminders
• Vehicle Tracking and Mileage

I have some screenshots of a couple of said applications here. Sadly screenshots don’t do a lot of justice to the site since it was quite interactive with the introduction of AJAX (Web 2.0):