sigura

Like I said in the description, Sigura is a CRM for insurance brokers, I'm not the owner, but I put a lot of effort and sweat into this project.
Sigura is a webbased application with everything integrated which a broker would/could need. A few examples: integrated mailclient, document management, voip, communication with companies, financial module, etc. It's 24/7 online, with an exception of 10-20 minutes at night when the backups are running. (a window that no broker is online)

In the beginning I did everything technical about the application, starting from developping the main application till the full server infrastructure. It's quite difficult to find a start to explain things, as there where many domains which I worked on.
For example I rewrote most of the c-client functions in a PHP wrapping class, so it was used to parse raw mail and extract everything about 1 single mail. The default functions didn't worked as expected for all mails, nor could it even open mails embedded in other mails (not really as attachment). If you know how many differences there are generated by mailservers, you could think about the many details needed (and exceptions) to parse a mail to retrieve all the embedded information. And this was kept in just 1 big regex parser.
But that is only a a very small piece, a much bigger part, which I liked a lot was the communication between companies done with EDIFACT messages. We receive all those messages for all our brokers and distribute them to the right office/broker. Those messages needs to be translated and analized by the system to know what's in it, if they can and may be processed depending on the information it contianed. When you process it, it will need to add, update (or even delete) parts of an insurance policy, damage or financial information which came with the coded message.

The server infrastructure is made as secure and redundable as possible to keep it 24/7 online with enough failsafes in case the worst could happen. And that with a very low infrastructure cost as possible. When a server crashes, shuts down, reboots, or in other words falls away from the cluster, the application keeps on working without the user noticing anything. We could even say that more than half of the infrastructure could fail and everything could still be running.

This was just a very, very brief explanation, of what I did at Sigura, I tried to not go too far into details for what I accomplished and made from it as it would just be more boring that it would already be. There are so many interesing details which could be talked about, but lets just say it would be boooring ;-). What I could say is that I enjoyed it a lot, and as far as I know, everything is still running as expected, even more than a year after I left the company! It's a piece of work where I'm really proud of!