My personal projects offer a window into my passions and interests, showcasing the work I’ve pursued over the years. AI and mathematics have always been constants in my journey, fueling my curiosity and driving many of these endeavors. Personally and professionally, I have worked with a broad range of technologies, gaining diverse skills.
Carsinia: Revolutionizing Used Car Dealerships
In 2009, I co-founded Carsinia, a comprehensive used car dealer management system (DMS), to solve a critical challenge in the car dealership industry. After HSBC Auto Finance closed its operations in 2008, my friend Ben and his brothers launched a used car dealership in Utah. They faced a major gap in the market: there was no system that integrated the reconditioning process with dealership websites and online marketing channels. Car dealers needed a seamless way to showcase their inventory, manage reconditioning, and post listings across platforms like Autotrader, Cars.com, eBay, and Craigslist.
I took the lead in building Carsinia, a solution that would streamline the entire process. The system enabled dealers to:
- Efficiently manage inventory and reconditioning processes
- Automatically remove sold inventory from websites and re-list newly available vehicles
- Post to popular marketing channels (Autotrader, Cars.com, eBay, Craigslist)
- Provide integrated credit checks and dealer management functionalities
I designed and built the entire infrastructure from scratch, personally assembling and configuring rack servers with motherboards, CPUs, memory, and disks, which I co-located in a local data center. I set up a robust, reliable system with backup protocols to ensure continuous uptime for our clients.
Carsinia’s features included:
- Profit Management: Monitor and manage vehicle profitability
- Deal Wizard: Structured deals for streamlined sales processes
- Dealer Websites: Custom content management systems for each dealership
- Automatic Postings: Seamless integration with Autotrader, Cars.com, eBay, and Craigslist
- CRM: Comprehensive customer relationship management tools
- Credit Reporting: Integrated with CredCo for credit checks
- Form Printing: Automatic generation of necessary dealership forms, for dot matrix and laser printers both, using Reynolds & Reynolds and Wolters Kluwer libraries.
Throughout its lifecycle, Carsinia supported over 50 dealers, and facilitated the creation of 30 websites and 15,000+ deals. The system proved invaluable to Ben's dealership, contributing to its expansion into a second location and significantly improving operational efficiency. Although the business was a side project that generated $250K in revenue, we ultimately had to close in 2019 due to competition, limited resources, and a lack of dedicated sales staff.
This experience taught me a great deal about vehicle marketing channels, integrating third-party platforms, and ensuring the security and compliance of the system. I personally oversaw a security audit using IBM Rational Rose, passed the tests, and successfully integrated various third-party services like Autotrader, eBay Autos, and Craigslist, even emulating browsers via a Java applet for Craigslist integration.
While the venture didn't reach the level of profitability we hoped for, the skills and lessons I gained from building Carsinia have been invaluable in my continued career, particularly in system architecture, integration, and scalability.
Technologies: PHP, C# (Mono), C/C++, JavaScript, Jquery, XML, Xpath, MySQL, Memcached, Qmail, power DNS, Courier, pure FTP.
