Out of a job for the moment, but back into hacking

Ouch, rough week. My position in Adelaide was made redundant just as I started to get some traction. Doh.

This week's focus:

• Go and dust off ruby, and rails skills, with the intent of building a linked data recipe mashup. Turns out in all of the waiting, someone has just gotten all of the data and done the linked data thing with it; the thing which stopped me dead the last time. Coughing up a workable UI for getfridged should be a snap, and gives me a chance to update my knowledge to Rails 3.0.
  Status: We're already sending pull requests on github, I'll hopefully be back up to speed within 2-3 days.
• After the rails bit, make sure I can still hammer out python. Something quick and dirty in python/gtk; talking to tracker over dbus might be the go to display neat statistics or information about your local desktop PC.
• Job applications: I've already put quite a few out there, and a few promising contacts so far.
  
  I've split it into two areas - happily looking at a wide variety of PHP related work; just to get back to something I love and to continue eating. While that's happening, I'm also putting our feelers around the architecture side of things - I was getting pretty darned good at breaking down communication barriers and Getting All of the Enterprise Java Developers to Talk on Friendly Terms.
  While I would certainly need a crash course to go from "intermediate Java" to "highly productive enterprise Java developer"; I can actually work well in a project role with the design of services, diving deeply into a domain and comprehending a data model.

I'm particularly proud of the work I did - building ValEx for 5-6 years from an idea in a back room of a small Adelaide business into a twice acquired, market leading platform.

I really ramped it up when my focus changed from ValEx only to RP Data transitioning to a SOA - I kicked down barriers, established communication between Dev, QA & business teams spread across Adelaide (2 teams), Brisbane (3-4 teams?), Sydney (2-5 teams/projects/etc?) & Offshore (2 teams?), and wore no less than 3 hats at all times (Solution Designer,  Developer, Project Manager, Data Modeller, Architect, Tinker, Tailor, but not yet Candlestick maker)

Some of the projects I did included:

• Rewriting & integrating an existing RP Data product in a SOA fashion, integrating with 3 different legacy platforms.
• Delivering parts of the RP Data consumer strategy - first in New Zealand back in 2011, and a much delayed linking of legacy platforms which I had been championing for some time more recently
• Fixing the address search problems within RP Data by an extra 8% or so, and advocating for a practical implementation of the next steps.
• Providing guidance to LIXI on improvements to the LIXI Valuation Standards, given the updated release of the Property Pro Supporting Memorandum 2012
• Providing detailed technical guidance on how LIXI can meaningfully adopt OWL or Linked Data related standards, continuing the discussion started by NICTA in 2008.
• Establishing stable identifiers on a number of diverse data sets, as initial steps towards linked data in the enterprise; amid a number of legacy ETL processes and other quirky things.
• Providing real world, usable QA controls (assess a transaction against external data sets, route and alert humans to abnormal information) based on linked data in a fairly complex workflow system.
• Finally delivered an incremental business intelligence improvement, plus helped coax some of the operational reporting onto something more like a SDLC, mostly by sending people pictures of Yetis whenever an SQL fragment was emailed, not put under version control. Pro-tip: Don't feed the SQL Yeti.

... and that's just the last twelve months of what I can remember. My biggest fault was not being able to explain it consistently and clearly enough - there barely seemed to be any time!

I miss the ValEx development work more though. I fondly remember making it snow over Christmas (which then promptly nuked the performance of all FF2.0 or lower users, oops); of hacking code all day but finding the really interesting problems to solve only at the union hotel after hours; of putting in the hard yards to get two major and several other important banks integrated, and efficiently working; of being able to walk into any section of the operational business and having friends who I could help by making computers work for them, every day.

I guess that interaction paid off well - there was such a rapid outpouring of support from everyone in Adelaide - from when I found out Thursday morning, and word spread a bit; right up to the last few moments on Friday.

I could not seem to make it ten minutes without someone offering a heartfelt condolence, or pushing a drink into my hand, or offering to help me get my foot in the door somewhere.

On being busy

Work is busy right now; and I think for the next few years it will be too.

Queries

I ran across a thread related to queries, CBA and ValEx.

As someone who is building this particular functionality, it's interesting to see what effect it has on the average person.

RP Data buys ValEx and part of Sandstone

Read the news.

RP Data buys ValEx and part of Sandstone

Read the news.

PlanningAlerts.org.au

Planning Alerts for Australia - what a neat concept.

It's basically an RSS aggregator for development applications in your local area. Even better, it's got an API for getting data back out.

I've just asked the City of Port Adelaide Enfield to have a look, and also the team behind EDALA.

You want this kind of thing? Email your council or land services department today! Write a screen scraper, email an IT department, do whatever it takes :)

Good Press

In the news again - here's an article.

Talking to 400 or so brokers, John Flavell said...

At the height of the crisis - March, April and May - time to unconditional [loan] approval at NAB Broker ballooned to 30 days.

However, since then, he said the bank had addressed a number of issues around the approval process - including those relating to valuations, verification and mortgage insurance - with the result that approvals on average were now back down to nine days.

Nice to know your work has an effect on others.

NAB appoints ValEx

We're in the news again.

CBA extends ValEx contract

CBA extended our contract.

It's been a point of pride internally at work, and it's good that it can be talked about semi-publically nowdays :)

Making the papers again...

My workplaces made the industry news as a part of The value of valuation.

ValEx gets a mention with

While traditional valuations continue to play a large role in the loan application process, the valuation industry is undergoing some very significant technological changes that make the valuation process faster, much to the benefit of both brokers and borrowers.

Three big changes have altered the valuation landscape in the last few years: the establishment of LIXI standards, the introduction of exchanges and the growing acceptance of automatic valuation models (AVMs).

The introduction of web services technology that will enable lenders and valuers to exchange information in XML format has slowly been making inroads into the industry.

LIXI, the Lending Industry XML Initiative, has been actively promoting this method of communication. While valuation organisations seem keen to implement the standard, lenders have been slow to come on board, says Andrew Duerden, national sales and business manager at LoanWorks Technologies.

"There seems to be a bit of pull and push at the moment," he says, adding that legacy issues for lenders may be impeding their participation.

"They're running systems that are 10 if not 20 years old and to change this stuff to support new standards that are based on new technology is probably not a small task for them."

The second big change sweeping through the valuation industry is the establishment of valuation aggregators or exchanges.

Exchanges house a number of smaller valuation firms that have a broad geographical reach. Exchanges are advantageous to lenders in that they allow them to deal with one entity using the same automatic process.

The Valuation Exchange, which was formed in 2005, grew out of Megaw & Hogg National Valuers.

"We saw in Megaw & Hogg the need to change the way that valuations were being delivered to mortgage lenders, because mortgage lenders were looking for a much more streamlined approach," says Andrew Robertson, Valuation Exchange CEO. "So we saw [this] as an opportunity to provide valuations back to the lenders still from a wide variety of different valuation firms but on a consistent streamlined technology platform that would be much closer to the goal of straight through processing."

Individual valuation firms, particularly the larger, national companies such as WBP and Megaw & Hogg have spent considerable amounts of money on IT to speed up processing.

"We have to as an industry," says Megaw & Hogg's Guthleben. "We have to stay in touch with our client's requirements and change with them otherwise we become irrelevant to our client. So you need to adapt and continue to invest in IT and stay absolutely focused on quality and compliance - that's where my money's been going."

Sweet; job security!

Previously:
ANZ invests in ValEx.

Geocoding, Google Earth and Work

So I'm pretty excited at the moment, as we're finally rolling out our geocoding extras for our work application, ValEx.

This means you can see any of the 3.6 million or more Australian addresses we know about in Google Earth; search by proximity; find comparible sales to your subject property; or see your appointments for the day.

Frankly, it's all kind of amazing.

However all of that was just swept from my mind by Google Earth is embeddable in your browser.

Greening your company... just a little

Here's an idea I'm about to pitch at work.

Our company distributes jobs to many other valuation firms. These valuation firms employ valuers to travel to locations Australia wide. An individual valuer can travel quite some distance in an average day, and quite a few of them work in metropolitan areas only.

So here's the pitch:
If you want to green your business, just a little bit, then consider paying an extra $2.50 with each of the valuations you order through us.
At the end of the month, we'll total the amount you've contributed and reward the valuers who work with us on a sliding scale. The more efficient the car a valuer drives is, the more we'll reward them.

With only 10 organizations participating in a city, each ordering 10 jobs a month; this idea could easily provide select valuers with a nice little bonus for making sound environmental choices.

Google Gears lets me use SQLite

Google gears includes SQLite. Awesome.

At work, we have a whole bunch of tablet PCs. I've always been a little bit hesitant about the worth of them for our valuers.

We've relied on a 3rd party solution for data capture, so our valuers can draw up floor plans and capture information about the property they are at.

To get the information back is a mix of air card (for wireless connectivity), soap services, a .NET client application, a .NET server built by someone different to the client software provider, a custom XML format which has parts resembling CSV in XML, and bits of our own PHP which were hastily patched together at the last minute, then promptly shelved to do more important things.

You can perhaps see where I'm a little bit hesitant about introducing features to our tablet users. However, you can get a few different Firefox extensions to improve tablet PC usage (scrolling for instance, or enabling keyboard input on the address bar), there's the CANVAS element, SVG support, and now Google Gears providing offline support, as well as a full blown database backend and the ability to offload intensive computing processes elsewhere.

It's no longer inconceivable for us to provide the floor plan capture software over the web, or provide maps to locations for offline usage through Google maps...

Want a Job? Solve this Puzzle!

If you want a job as a PHP 5 wrangler in Adelaide, solve this puzzle and send your submission to it@valex.com.au

Defining the Web of Data

Dany Ayers points us to Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web.

It's a pretty awesome video, and gels nicely with what I was selling today.

At work, having new computers for new staff with... you guessed it, new microsoft software, I'm trying to sell people on iCal, and RDF output from our work application.

A few months ago, there would have been no point. I'd have to sell them on thunderbird, lightning, the concept of rss, the concepts of open webservices; and I didn't have a compelling problem to solve.

Now however, I have that problem.

We need to manage the working days of our valuers.

• Where they drive
• How many appointments they make
• When they make those appointments
  
• And the most efficient route between it all
• Doing that means we can give them more work
• But to do all that, we need to do it from a communications hub
• Communications hubs mean we can keep the customers informed all the way along.
  

If you haven't guessed, it's half the email client, half the web application.

With the release of Outlook 2007 supporting iCalendar, with Google supporting GeoRSS; and with the ability to very easily give people links to google maps rendering said rss, I can now provide a very, very low effort implementation of our web application outputting data.

Combine flashy demonstrations (Google earth reading KML of where all of our valuers are today) with pressing needs...

For instance, we're currently not doing so well in keeping up with the changing requirements on our reporting appliance - everyone just needs more data, and we can't write reports quick enough! It's much better to just put the data out there, and let anyone who wants it stuff it into Access or similar.

We're also putting a lot more oompf into our soap based webservices - everyone wants to connect to us; to standardise.
We're becoming a webservices hub of sorts, allocating work and managing the details so our clients don't have to.

So it's only natural to begin to think of Valex as two steps away from Web 3.0 ... but maybe I should start to think a little bigger than that.

Help Wanted: PHP / Rails developers in Adelaide

If you have skills in PHP 5, or have built something decent in ruby on rails, then we're looking for you.

In short...

• We have a Really Big Web Application which supports about 25% of the residential home loan valuations done in Australia
• We've got a lot of smaller projects on the drawing board where rails experience is a definate plus
• We're in Adelaide.

... and we need you. Interested? Email a resume and a few links to things you're proud of, and we'll see what we can do.

Analytics and Valex

I switched on Google Analytics, on just the login page of Valex.
The code made it into production just yesterday - along with the shiny new training site.

For Monday, here's our stats.
Visits: 1,633
Pageviews: 2,228

On the login page. Just the login page. Ack.

84.14% of our users use firefox, with 1.5.0.7 beating 2.0 by a fair bit.
Basically no one is using Internet Explorer 7.

I'm amazed at just how much traffic we're getting. No wonder people won't stop calling me about password resets...

The latest ongoing hack

Update: it's called google earth.
Imagine: You are looking to buy a house. You want to be able to look inside of the house. You want to be able to search for things you like and things you do not like in a house.

Current Solutions:
Hodge podge realestate sites. A few inside photos taken with a digital camera and posted on the web. A price tag, an agent summary of the house.

Why this is bad:
Agents lie. You often have to do a physical inspection of a property to get a feel for it. It's a waste of your time and day.

Proposed Solution:
Semantic Web Friendly X3D renderings of houses. Ontology to describe housing attributes. X3D model tools to combine digital photos into a 3d model with a wireframing process. You can then "float" through a house, from room to room and get an idea of each object.

Can be also used in VRML type things, and could be ported to games (ie, in C++). Real world games.

Starting Points:
X3D - successor to VRML, which died in the arse. No killer app. No browser support. Better yet, X3D is open. They have an Open Source browser written in Java. PERFECT.


So, we'll start with a snapshot of the codebase. 10 Oct 2004:

Current progress - just installed. Future updates will track this progress.