Aaron Richner
Full Stack Developer

Our team received an alert about a web app we support that allows non-technical users to manage the members of Active Directory (AD) groups.

The algorithm used to write to AD was inefficient and imprecise, resulting in a job that took nearly an hour to complete and registered tens of thousands of writes to AD per job to accomplish small membership changes to the set of groups. This was largely due to the nature of PHP's native LDAP library, which is, ahem, not awesome.

The key to solving this problem lay in writing tests and instrumentation that allowed me to see real-time, execution-level data of when and how the application used PHP's LDAP library to actually write to AD. Once this activity was visible, I refactored the algorithm to be much more efficient, reducing writes to hundreds or less per day, and reducing average job execution time to less than 5 minutes.

DR. ACE is a contact management application for the Office of Disability Resources. We worked closely with the ODR team to design an application that fit their business process, digitized and improved manual, paper-based processes, and allows students to manage their course accommodations.

The project was successful and has been expanded to 3 of UMN's 5 campuses, with a 4th campus in the process of being added.

An agile, iterative process has allowed this application to evolve to better fit the divergent needs of the 3 campuses and serves students, faculty and ODR staff alike.

Our campus had a hodgepodge of different web authoring technologies in place -- mostly raw HTML that end users edited with Adobe Dreamweaver. The University of Minnesota negotiated a system-wide contract for Drupal hosting, and so we began a migration to this platform.

The migration included creating a custom theme, writing multiple modules to alter default Drupal behavior, and working closely with around 120 campus web editors. We established a regular cadence of meetings at which all were welcome to attend, encouraged participation, implemented requested features and moved the majority of campus websites to the Drupal platform.

Throughout this, my role was to work directly with web editors, the marketing department and other IT staff and coordinate our work, and do all of the development for the technical implementation.