The Nasdaq Stock Market

A true technology company

Ok so here’s the deal with Nasdaq and why I think it’s important to highlight. The stuff we were building in the beginning was pretty simple, as far as business rules go. It was like solve a goal and focus on the execution. “What questions does this software need to answer for you?” That focus taught us tons of awesome stuff about what to do and what not to do when developing and ultimately deploying an app that we then had to live with.

Years at Nasdaq

Enterprise Applications

Client-Facing Applications

Incredible Team

It Started With Enterprise Apps

Our early projects came in the form of enterprise applications that would change the way the company operated internally, maturing it.  This screen is a wireframe from an app called Nascent for those in the know…

Wireframing

So this was my first brush with wireframing to do rapid prototyping and I loved it.  We wrote NO requirements back then.

ASP.Net App

On our first project we build a fat client that accessed a database and it was a NIGHTMARE to deploy updates.  Lesson learned, we go web from here on out.

Huge Cost Savings Over Time

We built the thing and put it in the back of a web cluster with a multi-processor SQL Server license and it just quietly ran there for like 12 years, collecting data and solving problems for the staff.  What if we were spending a yearly license and maintenance fees on something that only half-met the goal that whole time?

Project Description

This was a pretty fun project in that we basically had a race between our internal development team and a vendor who was coming in with a customized off the shelf solution.  We built a tailored product that was balanced between familiar elements that people knew and loved every day in their websites with very domain specific stuff that the users would connect to in order to get the answers they needed out of this system.  We blew the competition away and the system was in use enterprise-wide until 2014!

P.S. Software always lasts longer than you think it will.

Project Details

Date 2002
Skills Wireframing, Web App, Requirements Analysis
Tech ASP.Net, SQL Server

Then Came Client Facing Products

Fast forward a bit when we started getting into the client facing stuff and it was fraught with complex business rules and such.  But it was cool, we could handle it because we had already learned the craft of building a solid app that could run on its own without constant support because we were able to focus on what an app was vs. what a blown credit limit for a clearing firm meant.

Project Description

Our team was asked to come in and help on the Workstation which had been a stalled project for going on 2 years.  We had to come up with a strategy to get this thing going again and launch it.  We got everyone in a room and worked the issue backlog together while systematically replacing each screen with one of our own designs until the entire application was redesigned from both the front and back-end.  We just needed to to it in pieces while keeping the application running in the meantime.  It was a lot of work but in the end we had made what was largely viewed as a backup product into a viable contender as a primary workstation for market makers.

Project Details

Date 2002
Skills Wireframing, Web App, Requirements Analysis
Tech ASP.Net, SQL Server

Portal Alliance Trading System

And then we built the Portal Alliance trading system.  A system that could be used to trade a previously completely dark market of Portal 144a securities.  Basically in order to buy and sell in this market you had a telephone and knew some people.  We made it so that these securities and their bid and asks were published.

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