Something Borrowed

2007-2008

I next worked through a software consulting company for a firm that provided a variety of services for the underbanked. One of their products was “payday loans” which despite some negative-press, was actually a highly-regulated process with decent record keeping and very up-front information on the terms of the loans.

The optimistic use case was for someone with bad (or no) credit but a stable paycheck and virtually no savings going through a near-term cash crisis due to some cataclysm (such as an auto-accident or medical bill, or something else that eats money they don’t have on hand). Without no credit card nor savings, the individual would be left unable to pay to ameliorate whatever calamity needed money. Payday loans, helped bridge that gap, but have a shorter duration for repay than most other loans, so they often had a calculated APR over 1000% (if left unresolved for a year), leading to the idea of them being predatory.

Technical Debt Remediation

Anyway, I only dealt with the software that took the information on the loan and generated decision information and documents (MS-Word IIRC, but using Aspose.Word), storing them in the service database, and delivering them in response to URL requests. The goal was to update the older legacy stuff (classic-ASP/VB6/UI according to an old resume of mine I found) to service-callable .NET ASMX endpoints for the Canadian development team to integrate the loan decisioning logic and document generation into their point-of-sales systems.

I also generated client proxies and WPF screens to simplify the integration process into the POS system – which was a Windows desktop/kiosk application. I also generated an additional down-level COM wrapper for integration into the UK point-of-sales systems.

Halcyon Days

Even though this engagement was about the same length of time as the previous one, the team was much smaller and it didn’t leave a scarring mark on me. Actually, the project and department manager just let me be most of the time and asked for updates, whereas I only needed information and framing for updates meetings with the Canadian and UK teams. It was a very pleasant experience overall.

Forward Thinking

Although I am always a little itchy to get on to new things, there was no red flags that made me want to exit quickly, and I only left when I got the opportunity to work at SAP as a consultant in late spring of 2008. I figured that would be a good resume item to have and it was moderately more money. August 2008 would prove me wrong, but that’s for later. I left this position helping them find someone to backfill me; a big shift from my previous position in terms of goodwill all around. I always chalked that one up to fantastic management worthy of emulation.