mwilly’s BodyBlog

We’re getting close to releasing our production modifications to some of the backend functionality.  It has been a tough road getting there, but we have learned a lot more about the system.  We have been working long hours to get to this point and our team is looking forward to taking a breather when it’s implemented and put into production.  There may be some dust settling that will take place but once it’s settled it will be on to the next big project of more implementation and customization.  Work doesn’t get boring and that’s a good thing.  A challenge thrown at us here and there adds to the excitement and keeps things alive.

Things continue to move forward in the Operations group at Bodybuilding.com.  We are continuing to develop applications, services and the like in order to integrate pieces of our new system to replace older software.  We have made it through a few successful demos and continue to release code changes that bring us closer to the cutover to production of what we’ve completed thus far.  The work has been enjoyable and it’s always good to be thrown a challenge here and there because it helps make us better programmers and better analysts.

On the health note, I’ve been wanting to start riding my bike to work again but it’s been taking some motivation to begin that.  Each time that I seem to get motivated to ride the weather decides to dump rain or snow that day and if it isn’t dropping moisture from the sky, the mornings have been bitterly cold.  Hopefully soon I’ll be able to start riding in again.  I have been running and lifting lately, so I’ve at least been getting that good exercise and am feeling good about that.

I’m one of the software engineers of the operations group at the awesome office of Bodybuilding.com.  So what is the operations group you might ask?  Well, we mainly take care of all the back end systems of the business.  After an order has been placed on the Bodybuilding.com website, the information is retained and the order is fulfilled through one of our warehouses.  As the operations group, we maintain the databases, and applications that allow customer service, the warehouse and many others to assist our wonderful customers with their orders.  If there are any questions, etc. with an order then someone in our office will use an application that we have developed and support.

As businesses grow such as has with Bodybuilding.com, there comes a point in time that the software needs to be update and/or rewritten to assist with the growing data.  There may be new requirements for software that didn’t exist years prior when technology was more limited.  This is where myself and the others on the operations group come in to assist and provide the business with their needs.

It has been quite the ride in the last few months as we have evaluated technologies, methodologies in how to execute those technologies and to some degree testing the limits of these.  There have been decisions that have been made, then adjusted and revamped and so forth.  With having to work with such a task as a possibility of rewriting the whole back end system it takes lots of discussion and analysis to come up with the right decisions.  There may not be just one way to execute a plan such as what we face, but there may be multiple ways and technologies that would accomplish the end goal.  We have begun rolling forth with one of those decisions.

After weeks of planning, analyzing, testing, developing and so forth, we began our first Agile sprint a few weeks ago.  As a result, we were able to demo our first chunk of development work to the business users.  It was nice to have something to show the business after we had been working for weeks on building up the framework, test environments, continuous integration and all the details involved with that.  Tackling a big project like this has required a lot of framework build up - work that needs to be completed in the beginning.  It sets a more solid foundation so that when the bigger and bolder tasks come up we will be able to run with them at a more increased pace and will be able to test our work more thoroughly.  We have implemented DDD (Domain Driven Design) and TDD (Test Driven Development) with our framework.

In addition to building up our development environments and the foundation of our new internal web based application we are tying existing data, at near real-time, into a new financial system that will be implemented and live in the next couple of months.

We look forward to more weeks in the near future that will allow us to show more visible changes of this new system to our customer - the business.  In turn, allowing our business users to be more productive will only allow them to better serve and assist our customers - each of you.  Thank you customers for allowing us to serve you.

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