Financial Times

Dates: October 1999 – February 2001
Position: Programmer

Responsibilities:

1. Redesigning the current publishing system
2. Programming a new publishing system
3. Creating a universal Tools Library
4. Creation of development environment
5. SMIL development
6. Documentation of new development
7. Backup of data involving gzip and mysqldump

The FT started out as a 3 month project which turned into one and a half years. The original specification of the placement was just to help out with the general day to day requirement of the code and improve it wherever possible. The system in place was far more complex than anyone had first anticipated. The whole project grew in to a total redesign and implementation of a new system. More details below. In total the team of 5 people (not including presenters) worked independently from the main FT.com web site and were only half funded by the FT. The other funding came from deals made from the content that the FTTv team provided, which required certain information being output and provided to people like Netscape, Yahoo and Lycos. These were again controlled by various scripts.

Projects:
Budget Redesign
Every year the FT produce a live web cast of both the pre-budget and budget statements. This often attracted a high amount of traffic from the people that could not get to see it on TV. This required dynamic SMIL input and dynamic content that could be edited and changed as the announcements were made. Most of this dynamic content was pulled in via Perl scripts and batch files running on the NT Server.

FTTv Pilot
This was a special pilot program to help us get funding for the new broadband format content. New SMIL, and new publishing content was required for this so a temporary system entirely coded in Perl with some HTML templates had to be implemented while the publishing system was still in development.

Publishing System
This took up most of my time at the FT and was a huge project. The current publishing system code although working to their current requirements had issues with a more long term solution. The redesign involved the placement of a MySQL server, Linux development box and a complete rework of the publishing system. The new system was a mixture of Perl, JavaScript and HTML, all looking up and placing things into the MySQL database. I designed, implemented and even administered the database using HTML based GUI coded specifically for the system. New developments pushed the code back as I was the only person working on it for some time. A second programmer was employed to help out under my supervision. Using my documentation he took control of development when I left in February. The publishing system was not only used by the developers but also by the presenters, producers and video streamers so the interface had to be user friendly and intuitive.

The publishing system had to be used for a trial period in order to successfully prove it provided a functional and reliable source of data. Once this was in place development of further functionality such as special presentations could then go ahead, including improving front end look and feel, output to various formats (XML, CSV) of the days content, and so on.