Cogenta

I seem to have stopped blogging, so I’ll spend the next 24 hours making up for that. First of all, an update on my work status…

 

Just before Christmas, I threw my CV online with Monster, which resulted in a number of phone calls from various recruiting agencies and three interviews lined up within the first week. By the end of my first week I’d been offered 2 of the three positions (and I’ve since been offered the third but have had to turn it down), so I’ve ended up feeling pretty good about my interview skills. The offer I accepted was with a company in Windsor, known as Cogenta.

 

Cogenta are involved in producing reports for large retailers that quickly show them the competitiveness of their prices. Companies provide feeds containing the list of products they are interested in, specify which sources they are interested in being compared to (for instance Amazon or Woolworths) and then the Cogenta NetPrice Collection Service crawls the web for the pricing and product information. Further software then uses this information to produce the reports for the clients, or the information is used in NetPrice Online to allow a client to more easily search and analyse the data.

 

My involvement is obviously with the software development side of things. It is my task to not only maintain and develop the current version of the software, but also to make sure that we are collecting the information from the sources correctly, kick off the processes that match the information so that we know a product from a source is the same one listed in the feed from the client, kick off the processes that do the reporting, and help to develop the newer version of the software that will hopefully do all of these tasks better. There are also other development considerations that I might be able to write about in the future, but are under-wraps for now.

 

I hope to still maintain contact with members of my previous IMSS projects, especially the MoD Grand Challenge team who are entering an exciting stage of development in terms of both hardware and software. And despite working in Windsor, I will continue to live in Reading. I like it there.