Finishing Up

We've been working on this same project for a while now. This is basically the third version of the application. I wasn't a part of the first version; in fact, it was already built when I came on. I added an arm of the application for representatives to be able to collect a payment from a customer without having to go through the quote system. Apparently this is the flow they want to adopt going forward, so it sounds like it's going to get a lot of use. After finishing up with that, we rolled out the first version of a virtual appointment setter. We finished up with this over 2 weeks ago, or at least I finished my part up. The SEO person is still working on creating the Facebook advertisement to accompany this virtual appointment setter, so while it is live, nobody really has access to it yet. Needless to say, our work was done on it, so we moved on. I actually came back to the payments application a good amount of time before my cohort did to start work on it. The goal was to create a way for customers to pay using their bank account, and they wanted a component that looked like an actual check and had the values come in dynamically onto the check. After some consternation, I was able to create this using CSS Grid, and it looks pretty cool.

After a meeting last week, we found out there were a couple other features we needed to add to the application to compliment the changes we had made. Specifically, the backend guy was completely unaware that we had even implemented the second version, somehow, though we had talked about it ad nauseam in meetings. With that feature, he wanted to restructure the table it got put into and needed an ID for the lead that was being used by the representative. That meant we needed to get a list of the leads and have the representative choose the appropriate one. This actually allowed us to do some pretty cool things with the application, in the end, and the feature itself turned out to be really smooth. With this, we were now able to pre-fill a ton of the inputs with the information provided by the lead ID, thus making it much easier for the representative to commit the sale. We also added another input on the opening screen to check the representative's phone number along with their ID, making the process just a little bit more secure. These additions were proposed to us around Monday of last week, and we had them implemented and ready to go by Wednesday. From there, we just had to wait for the backend to finish up their part.

I don't pretend to understand what goes on in the backend at our company. It's an ASP.net backend with a SQL database, 2 technologies I know very little about. However, I can't imagine it should take this long. We had meetings with the executives in the middle of last week and the plan was to push to production by Friday afternoon. That deadline was not meant, but by no fault of ours. Until today, we were waiting on the fields in the database to send our information. Without that information, we couldn't really put the finishing touches on the application. In the meantime, I implemented several pages to be fully reliant on React-Hook-Forms, which took our re-renders down from well over 50 to a total of 13 from start to finish. Before, every time a character was entered into an input, the application re-rendered, which at our size right now, is really not an issue. We have plans for this application to continue to grow in size and get more and more features added to it. Now, it only re-renders when that step is finished. Once this gets to a larger size, this will be a huge boost to our performance. I finished up this process this morning and moved on to some clean up. As I discussed yesterday, my cohort and I are at odds over how we structure the application, so I decided to give in today. I moved the whole application over to the architectural style he likes, and I think he was pleased with this. It pained me to do it, but I'll learn to adapt.

Until tomorrow!