As the company kept growing and the product evolved, we hit a point where we needed to speed up our time to market. Features had to roll out faster, and as I’d later come to realize, data and analytics play a huge role in driving a business. Our customers wanted more flexibility in shaping their reports, and the pre-defined reports we had just weren’t cutting it anymore.
Given my love for learning new things and not shying away from ambiguity, I got tasked with researching an integration with JasperReports, a Tibco product. After digging around for a bit and figuring out how it worked, it was time to build something to show the business the potential value. Before I knew it, I was back on a plane, headed to the States again, this time to sync up with the Tibco consultants in the same time zone.
Now, this trip wasn’t too long, but it wasn’t without its hiccups. My flight had a connection in Atlanta, and thanks to bad weather, the plane was delayed by 5 hours. I don’t even remember the takeoff because I knocked out from exhaustion! By the time I landed in Memphis, it was late, but thankfully, KR, a colleague, was waiting to get me to the hotel. The next day, I spent some quality time with him and his family. They invited me over for some real American burgers in the backyard – a classic experience. In fact, just a few weeks ago, KR sent me a photo from that day, taken 10 years ago. Crazy how fast time flies.
But back to the JasperReports journey – this was my first time working with a third-party provider, and I was the one leading the conversations. To be honest, I felt pretty uncomfortable at first. I wasn’t sure how to approach it, but after a few meetings in that chilly Memphis office (it was summer, but freezing inside!), I started to get the hang of it. I took the opportunity to learn everything I could about the product, both from a business and technical perspective.
The real challenge, though, was shifting my mindset. I had to step into the shoes of a business user and really think about how we could use this tool. At the same time, I had to figure out how we could seamlessly integrate it into our app. And let me tell you, there were challenges everywhere. Our app was complex, with custom fields that users could create, and how we stored those values in the database was a whole other headache. On top of that, I had to start considering non-functional requirements like performance, security (we had field-level permissions too).
This was the moment when my developer role began to evolve into something more. And I loved it. I enjoyed the complexity and how it pushed me to break barriers. This project gave me the chance to dive into the business side, something I hadn’t really done before.
With a PoC up and running, we got the green light to buy the solution and start integrating it into our app. The day we finally released it, I felt proud. It was a milestone for me – I had been involved in every step, from identifying the business need to finding the solution, getting it budgeted, implemented, and released. And to this day, I’m grateful for that experience.