Professional Portfolio Web Applications and Software I made for others
2009: MoverTrends
ASP.Net 2.0, WebForms, SQL Server
Mover statistics for the whole country
Statistics (on the left) for a whole zipcode. Let's see who's new in Beverly Hills!Every screen that shows results has a very visible "Add to Cart" button to buy the details.
Searching for movers around an area. Allows filtering my month of move and picking different distances.
Once results are added to the shopping cart, buying them is straightfoward.Note the de-duplication process, in case overlapping areas are added to the shopping cart.
Summary
MoverTrends sells mailing lists of people that have recently moved, from all over the US. Merchants can search for new movers by State, City, Zip Code, or more interestingly, just a radius around a specific address.
Every month, the site gets a CSV file with around 2 million records holding the data of all the people that moved that month. After processing the file, calculating lat/long coordinates for each address and storing them in the database, anyone can quickly search for their address and get a list of movers up to 50 miles around it. After a merchant finds the records they want to buy, they "add them to the cart", pay, and instantly get a CSV file with their data.
Typing an address in the search box at the top and choosing a radius, users can find out how many people have moved around them in the last 12 months. This is not very impressive these days, but a geo-query on 30M records was a lot less trivial in 2009 than it is today, and required some interesting hacks around the indexes to make it work fast.
Queries came back very quickly, despite the massive size of the table, and the fact that we were using SQL Server 2005 Express, which is quite limited in its resource usage, and running on pretty cheap hardware (Single Core CPU, 1GB RAM, 2009 technology).
Highlights
- Extremely Fast: Performs geographic searches on a 30 Million records database, in well under a second, on a single, very small server (dual-core, 2Gb RAM, 2009-era hardware), running both the web server and the MS SQL database.
- Streamlined purchase process: Going from a search, through payment, to the actual download of full mover data takes very little time and very few clicks.
- Subscriptions: Buyers can subscribe to get monthly updates of new movers in the areas they have chosen, automatically.
- Google Maps: Integrates with GMaps to show search results in a format buyers will be familiar with, overlaying little mover icons over the actual places they have moved into. Also uses Google Maps for geocoding (converting addresses to lat/long coordinates), and suggestions in the typical "did you mean?" Google style.
- Affiliates Site: Multi-level commission scheme for affiliates that bring customers to the site. Commissions are paid automatically through PayPal Mass Payments integration.
- Quick turnaround: The whole site took just under 2 months of development.
What the client said about my work
Blake Sitney
Founder and President, Marigold Technologies
"I hired Daniel to build MoverTrends.com for my company. He was able to not only quickly intuit the requirements, but somehow clarify them better for me than I could myself. As a developer, Daniel has a razor sharp attention to detail as well as the capacity to see the big picture and beyond. Developers are often difficult to work with for one reason or another. Daniel is that rare exception where developing applications with him consistently results in a great experience."
"Just want to tell you how much I appreciate working with you.
You are really a fantastic developer and a great guy. You have such a sharp eye for detail and at the same time a
vision large enough to see the big picture and beyond. I look forward to working with you long
into the future."
(excerpt from a personal e-mail, published with permission)
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