The Business
Radio stations have a very strong connection to their listeners. Just look at the windows and bumpers of the cars around you if you'd like proof of that. Dale had the idea that radio stations could encourage their listeners to visit their web sites if there were promotions and interactions that connected with the activities on the radio station. Imagine the morning DJs announcing some new concert and a special clue that you had to hear from them that morning to know. Then imagine that the listener could login in to a web site and answer a question related to that clue. Listeners who listened and hit the web site could earn points and win gifts or prizes.

The Problem
Dale took his concept to Jason Ives who did an amazing job, single-handedly turning that concept into a working prototype. They came up with a pop-up window (uncommon at the time), branded to the radio station, allowing the listener to login. That window presented the user with a live running display of their points, gave them a list of promotions to interact with and displayed a constantly rotating set of ads. Unfortunately, that prototype was written using Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology (IIS, NT, SQL Server). Jason was concerned about the scalability of that solution. After warnings, Dale sought advice and found me. Working with the partners in KO, Dale had received estimates reaching six months to a year to build the application correctly. I knew it could be accomplished far faster.

The warnings of ASP's performance and scalability issues proved prescient. Radio station KXL launched the first MediaRewards site in April, 2000. The NT hosted ASP system promptly crashed under the crushing load. You can read the details in an article I wrote titled daily reboots No Extra Charge!.

The Solution
This description is already becoming overlong, even before I get to the solution, so this will be brief.

I began by building an object model of the application. I mentored Jason as we went, discussing UML and design, which were new areas for him. We derived a relational database design from that object model. Working with Tom Beggs as project manager we began to imagine the resources we'd need. Hired two additional developers and began coding. Six Weeks Later the python version of MediaRewards was ready to show and two weeks after that it was shown to the first customers. Two weeks after that demo, KXL's i750, was moved to the new platform.

The migration was seamless and the scalability superb.

Postscript
This app, in 90% of it's original form, is still in use at KXL in their i750 area on the left hand side of the page. Signup and try it out.

Post-Postscript
Looks like that app is gone now. No longer showing up.

Skills applied in the project included:

Python , MySQL, linux, Apache, UML , management, mentoring

Please contact my references from this project!