The project that I’ve been a part of for most of my time here at Quicken Loans has finally gone live. Think of it as a flexible financial tool. We want Quizzle to one day be your one-stop shop for learning where you financially stand against the ever-changing climates of the home markets and economy.

The most important feature for most folks seems to be the FREE credit report. You might laugh and say there’s no such thing as a free lunch (as you may have learned in attempting to get other “free” credit reports from other sites). But at Quizzle, we not only give you a completely free and easy to understand credit report, but we manage to do so without your having to provide your SSN! I don’t believe anyone else is doing this right now.

There is a lot to be had inside Quizzle apart from the credit report, though. A set of your incomes and debts will be imported from your credit report into the Budget section of Quizzle where you’ll be able to manipulate them to gauge your debt-to-income ratio. You will receive a free home value estimate along with a list of comparable homes in your area. You will have access to handy calculators to help determine how much you should be saving each month for your retirement or your children’s college funds.

We have a lot of interesting ideas for the future of Quizzle, and there’s just no end in sight for the development of this intriguing new tool. We even have the groundwork laid for an invite system where people can refer others to Quizzle and gain credit towards perks and freebies.

I encourage home owners out there to check it out, see what they think, and perhaps offer some feedback! We’ve really only just kicked this thing off. And if you’re a renter, let us know during sign-up, and we’ll let you know when functionality for renters is added!

Today marks my first day back at good ol’ Quicken Loans. As a web interaction engineer, I’ll be working on and with their in-house developed PHP5/OOP framework, Skeletor. I’m going into the office probably a few days this first week, but once I get comfortable with things, I’ll be able to do a lot of work remotely, from my home in East Lansing. Just to prove how incredibly cool they are, they went and bought me a 15” Macbook Pro. Wholly crap how lucky am I.

I just returned today from spending the weekend in Chicago with Julie. The clubs in that city are serious business, let me tell you. (Fun!) Also, I go into Quicken Loans for my first day of part-time work on Tuesday since I interned there two years ago.

Here’s a blog entry for the sake of making a blog entry. I dj’d on dnbradio for the um.. third time tonight. It was a pretty long set, but it wasn’t great. I guess it’s just as well cuz I didn’t record it. Also, it’s kind of hard to stab at your keyboard when you’ve rubbed off all your keys. Or I guess I more like scraped them off. But anyway, it looks really frickin cool, and I can work fine with it most of the time. Hehe.

In other news, I made some larger updates to the Hardcore Racing eStore this evening. Both the search and the browse functions have been enhanced. I’ve ditched the idea of using ajax for the browse feature. It really didn’t make much sense. Instead, I take you to a new page each time. (It doesn’t break the back button!)

But the real exciting part about what I’ve done is the caching. I’ve been able to cache bits of generated html that require lots of database interaction so that they can be just called up in subsequent requests—without the costly database query.

And it was damn easy… (stay tuned)

Fresh on Slashdot…

Robby Russell writes “ONLamp.com has published another article by Curt Hibbs titled, ‘What is Ruby on Rails?.’ In this article, Curt goes on to discuss all the major components of the popular Rails web framework and shows it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. This article highlights all the major features, from Active Record to Web Services, which are going to be included in the upcoming 1.0 RC release of Ruby on Rails. With one book published already and four more on the way, do you think Rails will continue gaining as much popularity in the coming year?” An interesting follow-up to the two part tutorial from earlier this year.

I told you guys… RoR is on the upswing.

Oh, and my eStore has finally gone into production! Check out the Rails Goodness. Please excuse the design. I get to battle with clients and bosses over design/usability issues, so don’t blame me if the fixed width page is cramping your style.

Hardcore Motorsports eStore (site no longer available)

Of course I have to mention that the other day saw the launch of my friend Blake’s t-shirt selling business’s website, YourCollegeTees.com. After abandoning Yahoo!’s merchant solutions because they used proprietary and broken(!) technologies, I was able to whip up a nice site using the open source Quick Cart. (The website appears to be down right now.) I’m told that these t-shirts with funny sayings on them are a new fad; people are wearing them on those reality show things like the Real World. (Know, though, that that is very much second hand information.) Anyway, help support Blake’s t-shirts and pick one up!

Oh, and his more serious site offers bulk orders for organizations who want t-shirts made: SpartanSpecialtees.com.

Today concluded my internship at Quicken Loans. I think by now, everyone who reads this thing knows how much I enjoyed it there. We had our periodic “Team Appreciation” lunch today where the Web Team got to dig into a couple party subs from Tubby today. I got lots of goodbyes, and I felt like I would be genuinely missed. I received a gift from the HR team for writing their Time Off Management tool, and a gift from the Web Team for being on their team and doing Rockworld stuff. They’re too good to me.

In other news, I’ve been experimenting with Jack, Ardour, and a whole lot of other midi sequencers, synths, effects boxes, drum machines... Last Sunday I basically leaped into like 20+ programs relating to digital audio production, and I am basically just now starting to narrow the apps that I like to work with. I don’t have any sort of song or sound just yet, but we’re working towards it. Man, some of these synths are just overwhelming with all their knobbies.

I’m supposed to be moving into my dorm this Thursday. Tomorrow is for packing and last minute errands. I’m about ready to head back to the dorm/campus life.

Today was my first day working at Quicken Loans, and I must say I am most impressed. The facilities are gigantic and the people are numerous and exceptionally friendly. The kitchens all have free slushies and vending machines. One of the buildings has a small cafe place that you can get sandwiches, soups, salads, etc from.

They gave me a laptop to use for the term of my employment there. It’s not terribly powerful (it’s an old dell with 600MHz/256M), but they preloaded it with Gentoo Linux! (A bunch of the devs there use Gentoo on their workstations.)

Oh, and can you see the holograms of authenticity on my ID badge? (...and how they misspelled my name…)

I accepted the job finally offered to me from Quicken Loans today. My first day at work is Monday, and I’ll be working pretty hard for the rest of the summer. This job is a M-F, 9-5 sort of deal with the possibility of overtime hours. I can’t wait to begin work at this great company to see how I like it. Word has it they even have free slushies in the kitchen.

It was 2:50pm today when I turned off my car in the Quicken Loans parking lot and took the picture of one of their two monster buildings. After signing in on the second floor, receiving a visitor necklace tag, and waiting a bit, I was greeted by Frank Laura, and led to his office for the interview. After a good interview with Frank, Dwayne, and Keith (my boss from Tap Internet), I was to fill out an some application papers. I took them along with my information packet and informational video tape home. Anyway, more news on this as it develops.

I said I would make one, and here it is. I have started my portfolio with 8 projects that I have worked on. This is only a very small sample of the work that I have done—my own threadbox.net was redesigned somewhere in the 10-20x range. But my portfolio should serve as a nice sample of my work.