SEBConnect - Disadvantaged Business Portal

Project Overview

SEC Connect is a specialized web application designed to support disadvantaged businesses, minority-owned businesses, and small businesses from economically disadvantaged areas within New Orleans and Louisiana. The platform facilitates vendor bidding opportunities similar to the federal SAM system.

Key Features

• Vendor registration for special business categories

• Opportunity posting and bidding system

• Integration with HUBZone and women-owned business programs

• Support for convention center and public belt railway partnerships

• Azure-based cloud deployment and scaling

Technical Challenges

This project represented a comprehensive "bit rot" recovery effort, dealing with:

• Legacy JavaScript front-end frameworks requiring updates

• Docker build configuration issues

• Python dependency conflicts and version mismatches

• Multi-repository deployment complexities

• Continuous deployment pipeline restoration

AI-Assisted Development

Used frontier AI models as a benchmark for agentic software development:

• GPT-4.1 and Claude 3.7/4.0 for code assistance

• Gemini 2.5 Pro for complex problem solving

• Visual Studio Code agent programming modes

• GitHub Codespaces for development environment

Impact & Mission

The platform directly supports economic opportunity expansion for underrepresented groups and economically disadvantaged areas. It serves vendors providing services to important New Orleans organizations including the convention center and public belt railway.

Azure Experience

First major project using Microsoft Azure infrastructure, providing valuable experience with Azure's cloud offerings and deployment strategies for legacy application modernization.