by Conor Buckley

Index

• What is Golf Coach Direct?• The Team behind GCD• My Experience Working for GCD• Highlight of my work for GCD• Q&A

What is Golfcoachdirect.com?

• Golf community (Students/Coaches)• A place for their content• Live Lesson!

The Team Behind Golf Coach Direct

History• Originally hired team of programmers from Bangladesh

o Site was designed well and semi-functional

The Teamo Phil Auerbach

o Founder and Directoro Nick Haurus

o Technical Directoro Michael Barasch

o Financeo Developers

o Chris Yaccoo Conor Buckley

My Experience Working with Golf Coach Direct

• Work from home• Flexible schedule• Exciting startup company!

• How I received assignments: – Mantis Bug Tracker (Webbased bug tracking tool)– Telephone w/ Phil and Nick

It’s all about the Demo

• http://www.golfcoachdirect.com

Programming Languages/Technologies

Coaches’ Blog

Coaches’ Blog

Coach: Select Top Lessons for Community View

• Allow the coach to organize his best lessons to be shown to the community

Coach: Select Top Lessons for Community View

• Drag and Drop ordering!

Learning Good Standards/Practices

• Task: Give the user ability to change their email address• Problem: When you change email address, you lose your friends!!!

– ‘friendships’ table: foreign keys friendID and friendOfID didn’t use account ID!– They used email address instead!

• Solution: – Write SQL script to generate copy of table using related account IDs instead– Rewrite the many community modeling functions that use email address

Ensuring Scalability

Partial Overview of Architecture• Media Servers

o Video server Convert videos (HQ .flv) Replicate video with compression

o Telephony server Record and host mp3 from conference call

o Web camera recording server Web camera record and stream live

• Cloud servero Hosts the main siteo Load balancero Fast o Powerful

Transfer Scripts

Marketing Efforts

• Email Marketing Strategy– Develop Spider Script to collect as many email addresses from PGA Affiliate

site

• Spider Script– java.net.URLConnection– 3 separate Java scripts:

1. Navigate through user search page recursively and collect the user IDs used to link to their bio page. Dump collection into txt

2. Loop through user results and store all the inner HTML from info section• First/Lastname• City, State• Club affiliation• Classification• Phone• Email

3. Format data into XML file

Result: 24,136 user’s info collected

Fixing the Instant Lesson Tool

• Purpose: Allows students to request an instant lesson with coaches who are online and available

• Before (old team):– Ajax request (30 second interval)– Inconsistent– Not instant!

Under the Hood of the Instant Lesson

Lesson CreditDeduction/Refunding

Miscellaneous Work

• Cross-browser compatibility fixes (IE6-8, Firefox, Safari)• User photo: “Change Picture” feature

– Implement Ajax file uploading to change picture without refreshing the page

• Integrate the Scheduling Viewer/Editors Flash Components• Email Notification Settings• Video Privacy Settings Fix

Thank You

Questions?