Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

The last three weeks has been a whirlwind of work. I started work October 4th with my first official client. I managed to land a six month contract for a staff augmentation role helping to relieve a backfilled position. The environment is eerily similar to a job I had a few years ago. Small development staff, large queue of critical work to be performed, and a very large legacy code base being revamped with no documentation. I’m noticing a trend…

The company itself deals in pre-paid debit cards, and essentially acts as a banking institution for its many customers. My first week was one giant brain dump. I learned the systems, the third party providers, business processes, and did a big code dive. I also ended up getting a bit of a glimpse into the financial world of pimps and prostitutes on how they launder money. I learned about MoneyPak fraud rings, and how incredibly dumb some would be defrauders are.

I can’t go into the specifics of what I’m doing, but it’s mostly been improving internal business applications and site redesign work. This last week was working solely on improving an emailing system that relies heavily on ExactTarget web services. I redesigned the internal email submission system with an improvement in efficiency of more than 50%. However, please note that ExactTarget isn’t exactly a speedy email submission system. I established a baseline for non-async triggered send mail requests at 10 minutes per 1000 emails sent. The async model isn’t much better, but is an improvement with about 5 minutes per 1000 emails.

The use of ‘async’ for the ExactTarget triggered send messages is a bit of a misleading expectation. Doing an ‘async’ send is nothing more than setting the RequestType property of the CreateOptions object passed to the standard Create function call. It still requires a somewhat significant delay in waiting for the request to round trip back to the calling application with a request ID output. It was impossible to get any baseline expectation from ExactTarget on any SLA.

Anyway, sorry about going off on that tangent a bit. After having been off for four weeks I have never felt more refreshed and focused. I managed to overcome many negative habits previously impacting my ability to focus on one task for long periods of time. I no longer feel compelled to check the same six news sites constantly, I no longer require music to stay on track, and I have never felt more productive. I know not all clients will be like this, and I am just incredibly happy it’s been such a great experience on my first time out.