The Background

From what I gather in my conversations, when you are two miles underground in a palladium mine safety is a really big deal. Picture miles and miles of dark tunnels filled with bulldozers (called “muckers”), 75 pound rock drills (called “jack legs”),  dotted every half mile or so with caches of good old fashioned explosives ,  Pretty easy to see why keeping their miners up to date on their safety training is a big deal in the mining business. Federal regulations require that the mining trains their employees on all equipment before they can use it, and that they are retrained annually on all equipment and standard operating procedures.

My client has been managing the tracking and execution of all this training up to this point through pen and paper. With thousands of employees and hundreds of different items to be trained on, this system was becoming an administrative nightmare.

The Game Plan

Since a majority of these trainings happen underground, I can’t rely on a web based solution. Instead, the plan is to actually create two seperate pieces of software. The first, a web app where the admins can set up the trainings and get reports on the training process. This server will also host the master database, and provide endpoints for all client applications to sync the latest data.

On the client side, the main target for the device is the Surface 3, but it will also likely be run on some Windows desktops. I am thinking I will build this as a  UWP application, as that seems to be the direction Microsoft is trying to push developers these days. The client will sync all data from a master server and that provide the actual interface for the supervisors underground to administer the training. After a training is completed both parties need to sign off that the training has been complete, and the styluses that came with the Surfaces provide the perfect functionality for this.

 Next Steps

We’ve drawn up some preliminary mockups for how we think the whole thing should work. I am pretty rusty on the XAML side of things, so I will likely be outsourcing a lot of that work out on freelancer.com, so I can focus on building the admin web app while they get started on the UWP solution.

I will be headed out to the site in a few weeks to talk with all the parties involved.