While serving as Interactive Director at Band Digital, Inc., I led the architecture and technical execution of a major initiative for Harley-Davidson, the H-D1 Bike Builder (link).  This multi-million dollar project took about 6 months from concept to execution, and represents a paradigm shift for both my agency, Band Digital Inc., and Harley-Davidson.  For Harley-Davidson, H-D1 ushers in a new era of factory customization.  For Band, this project represented a shift in the way we do development — from an old slow model, to an agile and open one.  I am proud say that this game-changing project was delivered on-budget and on time under my leadership, despite major logistical and technical challenges along the way.

The application you see on the web is fronted by an Adobe Flex 4 application, with backend services built with Rails 3 and a MySQL database.  What you can see on the web, however, was only one piece of a much larger technical initiative.  The two biggest challenges on this project were (a) normalization of data from various sources at H-D and (b) communication among all of the various stakeholders — including several third-party developers working on other aspects of the overall initiative.  Suffice it to say that you need a VERY large and solid scaffold to build a robust toolset for the processing of data, preparation of assets, and then administration of the website (i.e. QA/proofing, deployment workflows, etc.).

In this case, the project scaffold involved a suite message-oriented middleware using an ActiveMQ broker, an Adobe Air Dashboard client, and several proprietary Java utilities for processing raw materials like PSD documents into indices and assets that are consumable by the web client and other applications (e.g. an iPad app).

In addition, the application and all data preparation workflows needed to have support for i18n and localization.  At launch the application is available in en_US and en_CA, but the groundwork needed to be in place for expansion to other locales when/if H-D chooses to open it up in additional locales.

I learned a great deal about message-oriented middleware, data management, best practices for scaling a Rails application, as well as new techniques for buffering images for an image-heavy Flex client. Perhaps most important of all, I learned a great deal about being a better manager from my talented and patient team of developers.