IBM

Experience Lotus Notes

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My first project while interning at IBM was working on a team to launch a website pushing the adoption of Lotus Notes for business users. Working as the only developer, I created a site from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/jQuery using an initial comp and content, taking design direction from the user experience designers on the team as the project progressed.

Daily Executive Email Reporting

I worked on a brand-new feature for the TSM Operations Center to send out daily email reports highlighting data taken from a snapshot of a client's server setup.

I wrote Java code on the backend to schedule the sending of the report, retrieve the data snapshot, and inserted the relevant data into an Apache Velocity template to output an HTML email and attached file that included more detail.

There were a number of challenges we had to overcome: email clients generally have much more rudimentary CSS support than browsers and even spottier JavaScript support, the email needed to have a small file size (made more challenging by the fact that images needed to be embedded to prevent downloading from a remote origin and the potentially large amount of data displayed in the email), and readability of all that data.

To accommodate the relatively poor CSS support by most email clients, the HTML was outfitted with lots of tables (it kind of hurt to write them) and some inline CSS, since separate stylesheets weren't possible. Having JavaScript twisties and various visual elements that would have made reading large amounts of data easier was complicated by the lack of JavaScript support by many email clients, so a separate HTML file was attached in the daily report email that could include these elements.

File Restore

As part of a smaller team dedicated to implementing a major product feature, I worked extensively on the visual components shown in the above video demo, including the login screen, calendar widget, job counter, and job drawer using HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Dojo (skip ahead in the video to see these other components). While some elements were borrowed from the parent product's code, I created the job counter and job drawer completely from scratch (using a spec), styling them, connecting them to the back-end service, and creating animations.