MasterPlan

In late 2016 I was working for POWER Engineers in Meridian, as part of the visualization services team, when my boss approached me with plans for a major reworking of an old Flash program the team had put together for the Federal group. The concept of using Flash instead of developing a printable document had represented a leap forward from the traditional engineering practices the team was used to serving, and they wanted to retain the advantages of a digital product over a printed book. But Flash, and the application, were both showing their age. It was time for a new version of the site plan, and the client was ready to invest in upgraded technology to reflect the updated plan content.

At some point I’d like to publish a demo or a video of the program in action, but that will require permission from the copyright holder. In the mean time, have a look at some of the screenshots illustrating how the app works.

After the corporate wheels ground away for a few months, the deal was landed, and I was assigned as lead developer as planned. The final product combined a huge collection of images, video, and site plan data including an elaborate layered blueprint view. And the best part? Since I chose to build components rather than individual views, decoupling the data set from the end product, the result was a viewer with a document collection rather than a single-use program.

One supervisor joked with me that I was making myself obsolete by creating a data-driven product. While he was probably right (once the program was done, anyone could create a data set and repurpose it to fit a new client’s needs), The opportunity to make something that the firm could reuse endlessly was too good to pass up. There are plenty of aspects of MasterPlan that I wouldn’t change if I had to do the project over again, and that one is at the top of the list.