zipRealty.com
Internet, Real Estate
Berkeley, CA    February 2000--January 2001

Java, J2EE, XML, Servlets, JSP, Octane, Oracle, Apache, Linux

zipRealty.com is the world's first online real estate brokerage. The company provides home buyers and home sellers an innovative Internet site, excellent service from its team of in-house real estate professionals, and thousands of dollars in savings at closing. zipRealty.com aims to create an enjoyable, convenient, and affordable home buying and selling experience by providing innovative Internet solutions and excellent service.

The first major project was the re-design of the company's entire web site, which was a significant three month project involving a new look and feel and almost all new Java code. Almost all of the code was re-written for this project. As the technical leader, I supervised the overall web site architecture, the actual development, and managed the development team. As part of the re-write, the following goals were accomplished:

	Dramatic increases in performance due to optimizations in database access and moving the assembly of static web page components from run time to compile time.
	Java classes to ease the handling of web site forms via XML. This allowed non-Java HTML coders to create new forms and modify existing ones just as easily as plain HTML forms.
	Build system allowing HTML coders to work much more independently on dynamic JSP pages and to have their own "sandbox" in which they could modify and test content changes without the need of a Java developer.

The next project was to fully integrate the web site with the back end customer service platform. This was a significant undertaking requiring months of planning, design, and analysis. The goal was to take the company's architecture from comprising multiple, incompatible platforms to a unified Java architecture based on best of breed J2EE (Java 2, Enterprise Edition) technologies for optimal scalability, expandability, reliability, and performance.

	Wrote and presented a full business case analysis of current architecture limitations and their impact on business process, our customers, technical reliability, and ability to implement future projects.
	Responsible for technical assessment and feasibility studies of the business design proposed by the product development team.
	Designed the high level system architecture and managed the entire technical design, development, and deployment process across two distinct but overlapping phases, coordinating with product development, the quality assurance team, and the information systems department.

This project is currently in progress, and is expected to take the company's software infrastructure, both internal and external, to the next level, allowing the company to flexibly meet any new business and technical challenges.