I used to work at CAIS Internet where I wrote a lot of Perl code to do various things. The largest project I worked on was Siteflex, a special-purpose content management system designed for real estate investment trusts. If you live in an apartment or stay in a hotel, you're probably paying rent to one of these corporations. The weird thing is that each REIT owns hotels of many different, ostensibly competing, brands.

CAIS was then in the middle of its campaign to wire every hotel and apartment in America (and some overseas) before anybody else, so they were giving away the equipment and the labor to install it in a classic dot-com attempt to win "mindshare," controlling the market by giving away the product. Their plan was to make money from advertisements on the portal page that every user would pass through on their way to the web. Siteflex would tailor part of the portal page to each location, so information about local restaurants, entertainment, events, etc, could be provided by the property managers.

Siteflex allowed the REIT to make all the design decisions, while giving each property manager the ability to maintain the information contained on each page. I designed it to use content modules that would each manage one type of web page. Siteflex communicated with the modules in one of three modes, using a protocol very similar to CGI. Ultimately one module, the template, became the focus of the back end as I expanded it to include script-like nested conditionals and expressions.

I led the team that built the system, working very closely with graphic designer extraordinaire Rey Leon to produce the user interface, and Joe "get it done" Hood on the programming end, but the project pulled in other members of the Web Services group, like Rita Gupta, Zach Bush, Allison Calderon, Asia Liu, and even Tom Wood to write and illustrate the online help system, build demonstration templates, manage user testing, etc.