1987 - 1995 - Analyst Programmer - Systems Specialist / Team Leader for Telkom SA
The majority of this phase in my career was dominated by work on the Beltel Public Videotex system. In 1987 Telkom SA was a government department, 'Posts and Telecommunications' that evolved into the Telkom SA SOE.
The Beltel Public Videotex system was a very interesting and challenging system written in VAX Pascal and delivered through a network of DEC VAX (and later DEC Alpha) based systems. The software and systems were very challenging and included distributed processing, operating system and database fundamentals. My role was in part to understand and support the software, develop new functionality and (later) to lead programming teams and infrastructure aspects.
This included:
Functions included:
The Maintenance and Development of the Beltel Public Videotex system. Understanding the design philosophy of a highly complex, online, real-time system. The online system software components comprised well over one million lines of code (mostly Pascal and some ‘C’). The internals were ‘home grown’, and included most typical operating system, DBMS and TP concepts, and were subsequently of a highly demanding nature. No training was available, and expertise gained was achieved by reverse-engineering the system without assistance.
Develop new online and support components for the Beltel System as required by clients and Telkom. This included a wide variety of projects ranging from simple applications to real-time internals, and involved the organisation of programming teams, project management, and strategic planning depending on the nature and size of the development.
Project Management. Control, co-ordinate and direct projects, including initiation, prioritisation, allocation and utilisation of resources, quality assurance, documentation and the organisation of programming teams.
Strategic Planning. Plan future system configurations and projects for the Beltel System based on the availability of new technologies and products and the requirements of the current and potential user-base.
System Management. Manage the development environment. Direct enhancements to the system management of the production environment. Co-ordinate and implement operating system, network, and application upgrades. Tune the production environment to extract maximum performance from platforms.
Technologies: