The performance of the tools, in terms of both time spent and memory useage, is an everpresent focus when hundreds of thousands of keywords are added each day to a system that already makes tens of millions of bids. I've identified several areas where performance improvements needed to be made, including:
Whenever I work on an internal tool, my priority is always to get feedback from the end users. I like to ask questions about how people plan to use the thing I'm building, build something rough, and use that to continue the discussion of what the final product should look like. At SmarterTravel, I built several new tools and refactored dozens of old ones to incorporate ideas for new functionality or eliminate pain points for our internal users.
I fundamentally believe that fast access to data is the key to success of any part of any business. Engineers are busy and often "priorities" lie elsewhere, so the best data is data that can be accessed without help. At SmarterTravel, I was able to build a SqlServer Analysis Services Cube which was able to replace most of our canned reports as well as enable much more data exploration. I also helped analysts proactively expand their knowledge of SQL which enabled them to dig even deeper into the data.
My main accomplishment was to develop a 3D client for their flagship online football game on an aggressive schedule. I replicated the structure for connecting to the server and developed the infrastructure for displaying the UI and controlling the game state. I gave a talk at Unite 2010 about some of the problems (and solutions) we encountered integrating the game into the web, including many of the networking issues we encountered.
Behind the scenes, there was quite a bit of work to be done to develop and automate the internal pipelines that produced the graphical assets for the game. Some parts of the pipeline integrated directly with 3DSMax, others automatically produced enums for inclusion in the code base.