The Frameworks
Swipebetween chapters.Chapter06/14
The Frameworks
Swipebetween chapters.Chapter06/14
2005 — 2012 · Sports
Senior Software Engineer / Architect
2004 was a difficult year for software engineers. The Y2K work that had carried the industry was finished, and there were more of us than there was work for. Things began to come back to life in early 2005, and that April I published an article on doing real navigation in Lotus Notes and Domino web applications. A recruiter called not long afterward and asked whether I would interview at the NHL. The article is why the call came: the league needed a Lotus Notes engineer, and it demonstrated exactly the skills they were looking for.
I had been a serious hockey fan as a kid. I started on a three-month contract in the final weeks of the full-season lockout, and shortly after it ended I was in Ottawa for Sidney Crosby's draft, having drinks with Mario Lemieux. The draft ran on a Lotus Notes application. It didn't need the specific technique the article was about, but the article had made it clear I could do this kind of work. I worked the draft every year I was there, which meant a little time around the players I had grown up watching — most of them league executives by then.
This first stint ran seven years. There was a long-term need to build out the league's internal applications and I liked the people I worked with, so I kept extending. It ended with the second lockout, when the league was cutting costs and releasing consultants while there was no hockey being played. I came back a year later for four more years: twelve in total across the two stints, from a contract that was meant to last three months.
It is also where I made the first of my larger technology decisions. I'm skeptical of a technology's staying power until I find one that looks like an outlier, and then I commit fully.
Built Longana, a framework that generated views and data stores automatically from Lotus Notes views, so the league could put web-based front ends on legacy Lotus Notes applications quickly
Built Adaptrex, the REST framework and API behind the front end, with filtering, sorting, paging and everything else the data stores required
Managed the migration of Media Game Notes, Amateur Scouting, HR systems, Team Finance and Analytics and other applications from Lotus Notes to a new ExtJS and Java environment
Developed the authentication and user administration system, combining Domino Directory, Microsoft Active Directory and MySQL to give league employees, team employees and external partners a single sign-in across both new and legacy applications
Designed and managed the development of the league intranet, consolidating every application into a single, consistent interface
Worked the NHL Entry Draft every year, supporting the application the league ran it on