After acquiring of my degree, I wanted new challenges. Particularly in the fintech world. I was seduced 😍 by I-TECH’s offer for a C# desktop app developper.

With whom did I learn ?

From who else can you learn the structure, coding practices and worflow of an enterprise if it is not the senior devs ? (I mean they were really seniors! 👴)

The primary objectivif of these seniors was to pass down the source code of the existing apps to the younger devs.

Actually realised later during the first month of work that the enterprise was renewing their devs and the seniors were doing the handing over of the different dev processes.

Note to self: Never create a branch called legacy from master and push that branch. The seniors will be peaced off.

What did I learn ?

I had previous experiences as a student with Csharp and winform/wpf. I was pretty good at it. But at this moment i was immerged in the reality of winform’s ancestor VB6.

I had to understand and struggle through the jungle of code produced on this platform. Thanks to my prior knowledge of VB.Net it was not too difficult.

The the new application was supposed to be segmented in sub functionnalities (even though they were still very huge). So I implemented a multiple domain abstraction on the main winform app and loaded the different assemblies according to the specific domain which represented the sub functionnality. This also forced me to implement an IPC (Inter Process Communication) layer for communication between the parent app and the childrend apps.

The User friendly aspect of the app did not have to be forgotten, so we customized the apps handling Win32, GDI messages and implementing design frameworks like MaterialDesignForXAML

On what project did I work ?

My principal mission when hired was to conceive a POF (Proof of concept) for the most valuable product of the enterprise. A banking software app known as ALPHA.

Alpha is a desktop app used to handle financial transaction at banking level. It is one of the most used banking app for credit union in central africa. Covering almost 70% of all the credit unions in central africa.

The POF was supposed to help us determine how much time and effort a good team of devs will take to reproduce and ameliorate the processes of ALPHA, using Winform/WPF C#.

The POF was validated and gradually evolved to a sample app which mimicked Alpha’s application functionnalities.