IEX.nl
Role: Maintenance, some minor design.
Not involved with design, did maintenance, additions and minor changes, also built new sections. This website is the flagship for the company and as such well over ten years old, with all the associated issues. It gets literally millions of visits every month, which also brings its own particular challenges.
Aside from day-to-day maintenance I also co-managed the moderation and support team and picked up 2nd-tier support for the streaming stock market-data application, which is offered through the site.
A very challenging, and therefore fun, part of my work at IEX. The CMS alone was so bloated and intertwined over the years that there were parts of the site of which no one at the company actually knew where they were to be found in the maintenance menu.
Both a good example of why stringent standards-based practices, naming, structure and maintenance conventions are essential and, over a decade of time, ultimately futile.
Accomplishments: Small miracles daily.
Lessons learned: Given enough time, even the best websites will turn into semi-sentient beings that fight you every step of the way when trying to keep them up and running.
Note: It has been put foreward that the site was named after the first sound made by anyone who gets to see the underlying structure and CMS menu. (Eeeeks!) This is not true.
Visit the site.
Please note: The code base is very old. It was good then. I didn’t build it. This site has millions of unique visitors and ten years’ worth of daily news-items in the database, an overhaul is not a small job.
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