Here is My Proudest Achievement, What is Yours?

It's very common that you get asked about your proudest achievement. I wanted to put mine here publicly so that I would have a place to direct people to. So, here it is :)
18 September 2017
4 minutes read
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It's very common that you get asked about your proudest achievement. I wanted to put mine here publicly so that I would have a place to direct people to. So, here it is :)

My proudest achievement to this day dates back to 2010. I was working at a local Travel Agency in Turkey while still studying Travel Management at the university and we had a Web site for our customers to book their airport transfers from/to their hotels by paying online. However, the application didn't allow our customers to book additional services with extra cost such as baby booster seat. In addition to this, we were unable to reflect our pricing accurately for particular conditions due to the limitations on the system. At the time, I was working at the reservations and booking department but I had a huge interest on software development, especially on web applications.

When our web developer left the company, I prototyped the algorithm to calculate the airport transfer pricing on SQL Server based on the number of passengers, arrival and departure dates. I presented this to my manager who was also in charge of the company's online sales, and asked for a budget and time for developing a new airport transfer booking system for the company. I explained that this system would have the same features as the old system along with the additional features we have always wanted. This was going to allow us to provide better service to our customers and reflect cheaper prices by having a maintainable system to build upon. My manger believed in me, and gave me time and budget to invest on this. I spent a month to develop the system and its content management system by coding the business logic in C# (while learning it at the same time), developing the user interface as a web application using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and integrating it with an online payment system. I had to deal with lots of things I hadn't known about but having a good support from my manager made me always trust myself and keep pushing to come through all the obstacles. We rolled out the system under a different domain name first and advertised it through Google AdWords‎ (you could see that version see here even if the styles and functionality don't quite work on web.archive.org). Within the first 5 hours, we sold a Private Minibus Transfer through the system Over the weeks, we directed all our transfer booking channels to this new system and kept evolving it. After two years, the system sold 32% more transfers than the old system and yielded 26% more revenue. The final look of the system is still running here and maintained by the company (I should point out that I am not entirely responsible for the new look of the site , especially for those red primary action buttons!). Proving myself with this achievement also gave me a chance to take more responsibility on software engineering at the company and I was able to get a budget for an accommodation booking system (it can been found on web.archive.org) which yielded extra revenue for the company for a few years.

Lots of things happened after this and I achieved so much more such as being part of several successful teams to create valuable software products, being published, having the Microsoft MVP award for 5 years in a row, speaking at lots of international conferences, maintaining a successful blog for 7+ years and many more. However, nothing was able to beat that because it was a unique opportunity to be able to fight for something I truly believed in. Besides that, having a true leader as your manager is a unique opportunity. He trusted me and my skills, and when looking back at this now, it's very clear to see that I would never have become a good software developer without this trust and my confident in myself.

What's Your Proudest Achievement?

Well, it's your turn. Hopefully I encouraged you to share yours publicly as well. Please share yours as a comment here, preferably by linking to your blog post which you are about to write :)