Expert’s words: Olivier Drot, PHP Full-Stack developer

Olivier Drot is an experimented PHP Full-Stack developer whose methods are based on Agile approach. He started his career in prestigious international corporations like Cap Gemini or EADS before creating his own company and then work for RANCH Computing on the evolution of the new version of the website among other projects.

The new version of the website has been released last summer. Why are you already working on its evolution?

For two main reasons, very much related to one another: when redesigning the site, important part of the job was to modernize it and give an easier access to information. But the focus was mostly made on the general website, not on the user account which has been rebranded but not reviewed. Thus we knew that this work had to be conducted shortly. Besides, we ran survey and, logically, our clients told us a few improvements they wanted to see: visibility and greater clarity of the waiting list, ergonomy, clearer display of my projects and possible actions, etc. So we have made themed working groups to build answers based on our clients’ requirements.

So what are the major updates of the user account?

First, the waiting list now has a much better visibility. We also really improve access to important information: no more need to scroll down forever to see the different farms. When cliking on “Queue”, you’ll see by default the 3 farms in columns and you can hide the ones you are not interested in. You can also hide the currently rendering projects to focus on the queue and choose to change the priority of your project if you want it to start quicker. An important work has also been made on “My porjects” page. Now you can choose how many projects you want to be displayed per page, use filters (rendering, validating, finished, etc.). And above all things, any action you may need related to a project (access to the log, the report, resubmit missing frames, or the same project with different parameters, etc.) are available in a clic with simple icons designed to make you go faster to the point. Making you save time is our one and only goal so we have redesign the account baring that in mind.

Sounds great. So that’s it? Evolutions are over?

Absolutely not, and that’s good news! We’ll give better visibility to the possibility to skip the cost estimation. Indeed, even though this step is crucial and we still highly recommand that you estimate each project before you submit it, some clients would like to skip it and see this step has a constraint. But the next big project we will work on is the dashboard. It gathers a summary of the user’s projects but the idea, based on our clients’ requirements, our goal is to give access to statistics about the consumption of each client (number of submitted projects, number of GHz.h used, spendings, etc.). There will be charts and data the user will be able to export the data. But you have to be a bit patient as we will do that a bit later.

So that’s more good news to come!