Opodo - Online travel service (Dec 2005 to Feb 2007)
User Interface Developer
Opodo is a pan European online travel service that has been in operation since 2001.
- Part of a 6 man user interface team working in tandem with java devs on all products (flights, hotels, cars, dynamic packages etc) in all regions (fr, de, it and uk)
- Work in both project based and maintenance work streams.
- Assigned to 2 main projects a) CSS framework and b)"Site Flex".
- CSS framework was about developing a consistent, scalable front end approach built to standards to replace legacy code.
- Piloted the CSS framework in a new product called Dynamic Packaging (where you can search and buy a flight and hotel combo). Then we started to roll it out to older products
- Site Flex aimed to provide the country teams the ability to manage their own content, independent of the technology - take the CSS framework and apply it to the Red Dot CMS.
Examples of Opodo work
Site Flex - Sept 2006 I was sent on Red Dot training and worked on migrating the front end codebase towards a content managed environment, so that each country could update their own homepages.
Dynamic Packaging June 2006 The aim of this was to replace old java based code within DP project with lean css based code. DP was the biggest selling product in the whole company, so this was a massive task.
Old front end Huge codebase, made up of multiple products, coded in different ways. Products were driven by old, fragmented code. Peform regular maintenance on this code.
Hotel Search Typical of old code, heavy on XHTML tables and forms. Everyone in the team had to bug fix for 6 months before we were allowed to develop new functionality and code!
Technologies Used
PC, Macintosh, XHTML, CSS, JSP, Red Dot CMS, Maven, Tortoise, Photoshop, JSP, CVS, Homesite, Javascript.