Real estate property management system

An expense module for a real estate system, for thousands of properties.

More information

This was a fairly interesting experience that I had. I was called in to take over a real estate property management system, which had information about everything from plots of land, to buildings, to even separate parts of buildings. Not only that, but this system used a framework by the name of Vaadin. While my experience with Java on the front end hasn't been too good (given that JavaScript or TypeScript can be a better fit), this turned out not to be too much of a problem, especially for more data centric solutions.

What I did

I also spearheaded the development effort on an expense module for this system, which involved importing lots of data from any number of Excel spreadsheets in a batch process, then parsing and processing all of them, aggregating validation results and loading the data into the tables when successful. Not only that, but all of this data needed to be manageable through the UI, which also meant creating the corresponding UI views, with all of the validations and logic in them.

What I learnt

Overall, it was a positive experience, though not without some challenges along the way. Personally, I learn that the waterfall model doesn't work too well when the requirements or data formats are subject to change, but thankfully good communication can help prevent these aspects from becoming an issue.