AMA Online Account is the web interface used by the 1 million members of the Alberta Motor Association to manage their membership. It consists of nearly a dozen front end Rails applications communicating with a Rails API site, which communicates with services delivered by other teams at AMA or externally.

Membership Management

Added the ability to add family members and upgrade membership. The Summary behaves like a shopping cart: multiple family members can be added before a purchase is made. A payment pro-rated to the renewal date is then taken.

Reloadable Gift Card

Built a Gift Card interface which allows members to reload various AMA related gift cards. The Esso Gift Card even has the ability to be auto-reloaded if it goes below a certain threshold. 

Billing Dashboard

Created a Billing Dashboard which displays what a member owes, their previous billing history and the ability to opt into receiving an e-bill. Developed the membership statement for each year which shows a breakdown of where they received value out of their membership, displayed in a pie graph.

Roadside Assistance Overview

Developed a dashboard which shows all relevant roadside information to the member. Allows the submission of an online request for roadside, or a battery quote, and show how many roadside calls a member has available. Designed a wait time widget that updates the wait times depending on a chosen location, without refreshing the page (with AJAX).

Vehicle Registration Auto-Renew

Allows vehicle registrations to be automatically mailed to the driver every year, saving time and hassle. Multiple vehicles can be added at the same time. Successfully processed more than 30,000 vehicle registrations in less than 8 months. This is an exclusive AMA member benefit, and is not available to anyone else in Alberta.

The registrations currently go into a AMA Simple Queue using the shoryuken gem, and then are passed on to another service to be processed by registry agents at AMA.

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Join / Promo Funnel

Did numerous redesigns of the Join funnel and Promo funnel, according to the specifications of the business.

• When Marketing desired to do unique promotions, such as a free oil change with signup, a change to the promo funnel was required. Often, the page flow had to be redesign and the routing had to be changed, as well as new endpoints often needed to be called.
• The main Membership Join Flow was often changed to reduce friction:
  • Pre-selected desired (by the business) coverage levels
  • Hide as much information as possible until it was needed 
  • Reduced the number of steps in the process
  • Added a monthly payment option which spread out the cost of membership over the whole year
• Added a promo field to the join checkout tunnel

Rebuilt AMA's driver education platform, allowing more courses to be enrolled and taken online. The Ruby on Rails app interacts with an in-house Microsoft Dynamics CRM, using various forms to collect and organize student registration information. Moodle is used to display the online course itself, and the student is logged in using a cookie (they don't need to maintain their own moodle account)

There is a similar app created just for agents to allow them to to register a driver ed student when they come into an AMA Centre. CRM specific logic was added to a gem we created in order to allow code sharing between the apps.  

Developed an insurance quote tool for AMA Home and Auto insurance. Guidewire specific information that was not AMA related was encapsulated a new Guidewire gem. Unlike other multi-page forms at AMA, Active Record (PostgreSQL) was not used to maintain the state of the data in intermediate steps. Instead, the Guidewire gem was designed to simulate a database, but instead made api calls to the Guidewire installation developed and maintained by the insurance team at AMA. While this counter to how a Rails application works in it's most natural state, it made it easier to maintain the state of the user data, as it was not persisted in multiple places. 

Also the application was made to appear less intimidating to a user by even compartmentalising each page into multiple sections using JavaScript (CoffeeScript), and only doing the page submission at the end. The app also generates an email quote and sends it to the potential insuree.

Designed and built a nested Todo app in react. Uses AWS Cognito for authentication and allow each user to create their own nested stack of Todo's. One can estimate how long a task will take, and measure their progress throughout the task. Each task can be infinitely split into further subtasks. When main tasks are completed, they go are moved to the "Completed Task" tab. Deleted tasks go to the "Deleted Tasks" tab where they can be permanently deleted.

The estimates (pomodoros) from each subtasks are added in the main tasks, and we can thus see the total amount of estimated time completed versus the total time. The app doesn't actually track your pomodoros or whatever units of time you choose yet, it merely asks you to give estimates on how long something took. This makes it easier to fill in a task after the fact, without having to record it as you're doing it

Free PDF 2 JPG conversion tool. Uses React JS for the front end and is hosted on S3/Cloudfront. Uses API Gateway and a couple lambdas to to convert the pdfs, and stores the result in S3. Serverless is used to generate some of the backend, other parts a built with AWS Amplify. Users can view previous PDFs uploaded on the same device by selecting them from the dropdown. The references to these uploads can be locally deleted, but the server only removed them after 30 days.

I've added an animated GIF to the site that shows how to use it, to try to encourage it's use. I think it's unique compared to many other pdf converters i've seen in that you can view thumbnails and full screen images before downloading anything, which makes it very convenient to download only what you may need.

I've written up a tutorial on how to build an app such as this. Click on here for Part 1 - React App. Part 2 (More React Components) is here, and Part 3 (Serverless Lambda) is here.

Developed the AMA Driver Education Learner's Licence Practice Exam to sharpen student skills in preparation for their Alberta Class 7 Learner’s Licence exam.

• Randomly selects 30 questions from hundred made available through an API endpoint maintained by the AMA marketing team
• Uses local storage to allow a limited number of quizzes to be taken offline
• Collects analytic information through AWS Pinpoint and AWS Kinesis Firehose and sends it to an on-premise Kafka server
• Is deployed through VS AppCenter and uses CodePush for most changes
• AWS AppSync is used to maintain the NoSQL database

Developed an internal shopping cart app for AMA agents to use in order to make a purchase. There was an over the phone or in-centre option to using the cart. When over the phone, the agent was to use PureCloud to record the screen and the voice conversation they were having with the customer. When the payment page was open, the recording was designed to pause, in order to prevent sensitive credit card information from being recorded. If customer completed the transaction or went back to the previous page, it hard to be resumed. This resulted in some complicated redirect logic, especially because pausing purecloud was a multi-step process, where the first api call required a redirect to ensure the agent was logged in.

My work for the Edmonton Dream Centre, and a course on Technology for Teachers inspired me to try to build an educational platform that would function both as a testing tool and a learning platform. While quiz-making apps exist, most do not support the creation of even rudimentary learning modules. Even educational tools typically cater more to Quizzes (for instance Socrates), or more on learning content, at the expense of testing (Blendspace comes to mind).

The Dream Trainer is an attempt to combine both learning modules and testing (multiple choice, for now) in a single web interface. While designed for the Edmonton Dream Centre, it will be made available to the public as well.

Unlike more open platforms like Udemy, Students or Employees (leaners) will only be able to participate through an invite from an instructor, making it ideal for a classroom or a business where information should not be made available to the public. Each instructor will have their own private space to create modules and quizzes, and the people he invites will be able to view only the one instructor's material.

This Blog itself is a Ruby on Rails app that I've developed to serve as my home base on the web. The admin side is a content management system that allows the creation of Portfolios with additional items attached to them. Both Blog Posts and Portfolios can be visible at my discretion, and Blogs can even be released at a predefined time. The comment system is nested recursively, allowing comments respond to other comments. Images are uploaded to S3 with Paperclip. I deploy the Blog using Capistrano to an EC2 on AWS