Robert Van Der Dussen

Entelect is a consultancy company that contracts its employees out to various companies within Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the world.

During my first month and a half with the company, I was placed in our internal development space, referred to as The Shire.

• I worked on our company's Slack Bot, which is an app within Slack that we use to perform a number of company tasks. The functionality that I worked on was to provide a means of nominating a group of employees for good work. (The technologies used in this task were Slack, TypeScript, Block Kit Builder, Slack API, AWS, Lambda Functions, DynamoDB, Trello, Miro, GitHub, and GitHub Actions.)

My first actual company posting was at a home loans provider, which lasted two and a half months. Unfortunately, our contract at this company was not renewed, so it ended up being a rather short contract.

• I worked on adding additional GTM tags to one of their systems, to allow for improved journey tracking. (The technologies used were Google Tag Manager, Miro, Confluence, JavaScript, Jira, and GitLab.)
• I worked on adding newly defined API endpoints. The technologies used were C#, SQL, Jira, and GitLab.

My next posting was at a vehicle fleet tracking company, where I worked for just over 10 months.

• Our team was tasked with rewriting the company's Elastic Search implementation. Unfortunately, their existing implementation had become quite dated, and they were forced to do an entire rewrite. We needed to update from ES6 to the most up-to-date ES cloud. I was on this task for five months. (The technologies used were Elastic Search 6 and 8, Azure, Service Bus, Datadog, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, SQL, C#, XUnit, Miro, Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, GitHub, Azure DevOps, and GitHub Actions.)
• I was moved to another team, where we urgently needed to provide a higher degree of observability and monitoring for a specific sector of the business. I was on this team for four and a half months. (The technologies used were Datadog, Azure, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, SQL, C#, Service Bus, Terraform, Jira, and Confluence.)

My next posting was assisting in building various websites to allow property investors in the UK to find properties that could provide them with a guaranteed government rental.

• This project was a greenfield project, where we built the entire infrastructure in AWS using multiple AWS offerings, and provided an easy means of provisioning the infrastructure using Terraform. All three of the websites were built using ReactJS, with a C# backend. (The technologies used were AWS, SES, Cognito, SQS, Lambda Functions, S3, EventBus Schedulers, ECS, ECR, MySQL, Terraform, GitHub, GitHub Actions, Trello, Miro, C#, ReactJS, NextJS, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, and Docker.)

DirectAxis is a company which provides Personal Loans and other financial services to customer's within South Africa, the company is primarily made up of a large number of call center agents, however they also have an IT department of more 200 personnel.

DirectAxis is also a sister company of a larger group of companies called The First Rand Group.

The systems that I mostly worked on included but were not limited to:

• IDP – Which is their external website that allows customers to capture and process their loan applications on mobile and web, without having to speak to a call center representative. I was deeply involved in the development of this system all the way from design and requirements gathering to development and delivery. This system makes use of the following technologies (C#, .NET Full Framework, RESTful API's, WCF API's, Entity Framework, nHibernate, SQL Server, RabbitMQ and Angular).
• DALAS – Which is their internal windows-based application which all the call center agents use in order to capture and process customer's loan applications. I took a lead role on several occasions in developing new functionality and enhancing existing features, I also worked for more than 2 years in a production support capacity for this system. This system makes use of the following technologies (C#, .NET Full Framework, Windows Forms, nHibernate, SQL Server, RabbitMQ and Windows Services).
• SecureChat – First National Bank's chat program, allowing customers to communicate with their banking representatives in a secure manner. I was instrumental in developing new functionality and enhancing existing features, including performing major rewrites to update the efficiency of legacy code. This system makes use of the following technologies (C#, dotnet Core, .NET Full Framework, RESTful API's, WCF API's, Entity Framework, SQL Server, Windows Services, Angular and Typescript).

EOHMC was primarily a software development consulting company, whereby they would dispatch their employees to other companies requiring software development specialists.

Upon joining the company they were in the process of piloting a new training and upskilling academy which all new software developer recruits were requested to go through for the first 3 months of working at the company. I was placed in this academy and can honestly say that those 3 months played a pivotal role in my career growth as I was able to learn more than all three of my years at university combined.

Once I completed those 3 months I was immediately placed at DirectAxis, where I worked for 6 months before being recruited by them.

At DirectAxis I got my first introduction to working in a team environment and following the latest industry standards.

My tasks while working at DirectAxis, primary involved maintaining and optimizing existing websites, using C#, ASP.NET, AngularJS as well as other technologies.

SpaceSoft's a company that primarily provides Laboratory testing software to several of South Africa's private and government laboratories, along with support packages.

• I designed and developed a SOAP service to allow third party customers to send us their data in either JSON or XML format and then based on the schema of their data our system would re-map it into our propitiatory format and then save into an MS SQL database, for later processing. We also allowed our customers to then retrieve their processed results in the same format that their data was sent to us in, using the same SOAP service.
• Most of my development experience at this company entailed, designing and adding additional features to our main laboratory testing software, although there were also a couple of smaller stand alone Windows Forms applications that I was in charge of developing.
• One of my other duties was to investigate and resolve any issues that our customers would raise and then report back to the customer.

The technologies I primarily used were C#, ASP.NET, MS SQL, HTML and CSS.