Pentagon

While at Bear River Associates in the early 2000's, I had a great opportunity to work on a project for the US Pentagon. Right, "The Pentagon"!

I was 2nd on the project and involved in most all aspects of the design and development from the beginning to the end. I learned a huge amount while working on that project.

The work was assisting the personnel to track vendors and other people coming in and out of the various areas of the Pentagon. This project really brough home the ideas, not only of secutiry, but authorization and workflow and how they can be implemented in software.

A few of the tasks I worked on for this project are:

• Solid design documentation - we generated pages and pages of design docs, requirements at different levels and plenty of user docs. Although, writing docs is not my forte, it was really needed for this project to complete as well as it did.
• Configuration management - There were tons of elements in the system that needed to be setup and configured by the client, accounts with different privileges, lists of different items, calendars, working hours, etc. I ended up building some custom templating to make it go easier. The create, read, update, delete cycle for dozens of web pages went pretty fast overall.
• Report creation - Everyone loves reports, right? Actually generating report data is not that hard, but presenting it in meaningful ways is. For this project, I helped make a PDF based layout engine for reports using simple declatitive tags so that the reporting couple be developed using markup. All the normal business tier was used so no special report SQL crept into the project. It was a nice framework that Bear River ended up developing further as time went on.