Mental Help Net
At Mental Help Net, I designed the server architecture for a site that could handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per day and was database-backed (at a time when backing a static Web site with a database was seen as a curiousity, especially in the healthcare field). We used open-source software because our budgets were limited, but built the whole thing on IBM's AIX for security and stability reasons (plus it was a vendor we had a close relationship with at CMHC Systems, the company backing Mental Help Net at the time). The system was redundant, based upon multiple servers, and used round-robin DNS as a means of a poor-man's load balancing. We wrote our own discussion forum software, database management and UI routines, and created a rating and review systems for our directory of mental health and psychology Web sites that was one of the first of its kind when released in 1995. We also were the first to implement a viral marketing initiative in the healthcare online arena by leveraging our rating system into a series of "award badges" that the sites we rated would then display (and link back to Mental Help Net). At the time of my departure in 1999, Mental Help Net had become one of the top-10 mental health destinations on the Web, with virtually no marketing budget.

drkoop.com and LifeHelper.com
I left Mental Help Net in 1999 to explore dot.com possibilities during the Internet goldrush era. I worked briefly on drkoop.com's site and built their mental health center for them as a senior editor. (Drkoop.com was the former Web site of the former Surgeon General of the U.S.)

I then went to work for a firm initally called GeoRelations, Inc. (dba LifeHelper.com). This was a dot.com startup intended to be a life services portal offering personality profiling, matchmaking, and social networking. Gil Amelio, the former head of Apple Corp. for 500 days in the late 1990's sat on our board, so it seemed like a solid Internet venture. As the Vice President of Research & Development, I architected a Microsoft-based solution to the problem of providing a high-capacity, high-transaction networking and social portal. I worked with a team of highly-motivated developers in Visual Interdev, IIS, and ASP to create a proof-of-concept prototype, and then a full production system of the portal. We were approximately 80% completed after 9 months' time before the company was unable to its next round of funding. We utilized multiple Compaq rack servers for both the application and database needs (RAID configured), load balancers from Hydraweb, and Cisco routers and firewalls to build a highly-scalable and reliable three-tier architecture. I oversaw a staff of 14 employees while in this position, including remote developers in India.

HelpHorizons.com
I moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 2000 and joined HelpHorizons.com as their chief operating and chief information officer. While there, I led our development team in building a robust ASP-based application service to meet the needs of therapists in clinical practice. Based upon the business plan and the identified needs at the time, I engineered a high-availaibility, high-transaction systems platform. The three-tier architecture was based upon Compaq rack servers for both the application and the database, a Compaq RAID storage array for redundancy of the database, Hydraweb load balancers, and Cisco routers and firewalls. We built the platform based upon purely Microsoft components, including Windows NT 4.0 Server, IIS, and ASP. We also designed and built a Web-based management system to take care of daily site maintenance tasks by non-IT staff. I oversaw a staff of 12 full-time employees and consultants. While this company remains in business today and I continue to consult with them, they have moved to a simpler architecture as their business needs have also simplified.

Undisclosed
In 2001, I joined an undisclosed company as their Senior Web Architect to help the company design, develop and successfully launch a public Web site to highlight their unique but secretive product. The company had already chosen Oracle as their backend solution for both their database and applications (CRM, inventory management and financials). This limited the choices of technologies we could use in keeping with management's desire to keep costs low and minimize complex implementations. Since we were initially concerned with site availability, I chose Akamai content delivery services to ensure 100% availability of the site during our inital launch to over 1 million visitors and 10 million page hits in our first week. Our origin servers are hosted on the Sun Solaris platform (in keeping with our Oracle hosting solutions) at a remote data center in Denver, CO. While working for this company, I developed a number of custom applications, including a scheduling application for training appointments, a contest review and rating system, a customer service autoresponder and FAQ system, and a dealer locator and database. I customized and wrote new routines for Oracle's iStore application, an e-commerce store front written utilizing Java, JSPs, and EJBs. I coordinated projects and tasks in a cross-functional, largely flat corporate environment, and trimmed hosting and related server costs while here over 70% in two years.

Last reviewed:
  On 7 Sep 2006
  By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.