Ben Quinlan

GIVIT is a not-for-profit organization that connects donors with support organizations to ensure donations get to those who need them most.

For this project, I operated as a solution architect and lead developer working with GIVIT to reevaluate their existing processes used within their current platform and define the new solution that would become the core of their business. In this role, I was required to determine the scope of work, create and estimate tickets and work items, operate as a senior developer within the team, and oversee other developers, ensuring the quality of the final product.

The final product produced included:
• New public website where donors could see required items from over 4,000 organizations across Australia and pledge to donate items or make financial donations.
• Bespoke web application accessed by GIVIT administrators and users from the over 4,000 organizations where they can add items they need and view donations pledged by donors.
• Service for handling post-processing tasks, including sending notifications and regular alerts.

To support the large user loads expected during natural disasters, we decided to host the platform in Azure with support for auto-scaling.

Racing Queensland is the governing body for thoroughbred, harness, and greyhound racing within the state of Queensland.

I first inherited the Racing Queensland website to completely redesign and restructure their site and content. The request was to entirely rebuild the website using the Kentico CMS as the base of the solution. During this rebuild process, I operated as a team lead, managing tasks and reviewing the quality of work while also participating in the development.

Although my contribution to the initial project rebuild was of a lead developer, my role extended to a solution architect: I then worked with the client as the project underwent additional redesigns and new features were added.

There were several challenges that I faced on this project, including:
• Creating an interface for displaying meeting and race details that was able to show the maximum amount of racing data while not appearing cluttered or bloated.
• Managing the performance of the meeting and race pages due to the large and complex structure of race and horse data.

Brisbane Zero is a website developed by Zeroseven in partnership with Micah Projects and the Brisbane Alliance to End Homelessness to provide real-time data to track rough sleepers and connect them with house supper and services they need.

For this project, the staff of Zeroseven worked directly with members of the Micah projects team for over 48 hours in a hackathon-style environment. Given the scope of the website, the Umbraco CMS was the obvious choice of platform as it allowed for rapid development while still being a fully-featured CMS.

I worked as a lead developer for this project, overseeing the back-end developers, managing tasks, and assisting in putting out fires so that the team faced fewer issues and could continue to code.