e-Commerce enthusiast currently rocking e-tourism as a Techlead and Development Manager at Alturos Destinations. Managing a team of 30+ engineers across 25+ customers and in charge of development of the Peaksolution™ e-commerce platform › DevOps, Linux, Agile, PHP, Java, OpenSource
curriculum vitae, cv, techlead, development manager, architect, java developer, j2ee architect, banking, java beans, financial, insurance, j2ee consultant, it consultant, design patterns, ecommerce, e-commerce, elasticsearch, solr, e-business, eclipse, java, j2ee, systems integration, jdbc, jsp, jboss, mvc, portal development, retail, sql, systems integration, telcos, telecoms, telecommunications, uml, websphere, websphere application server, gerd w. naschenweng, austria, österreich, kärnten, klagenfurt, deutschland

Career Profile

20+ years in software development (Java, agile, DevOps), with both hands-on and leadership experience.

With his return to Austria in late 2018 Gerd joined Alturos Destinations as Techlead and Development Manager for Peaksolution where his role involves the management of the development pipeline across 6 teams with 34 engineers on-site and a remote-team located in Lviv, Ukraine. He manages all development initiatives within Peaksolution for the responsive-, mobile- and self-service channels. A highly agile team of engineers delivers up to 15 software releases per week at 25+ installations across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France.

Between 2010 - 2018, Gerd served as the CTO of bidorbuy.co.za, overseeing architecture, technical design, strategy and technical product development for Africa’s largest e-commerce platform. During his tenure at bidorbuy Gerd built up a full-stack Java development team, established a DevOps team, built a high-performant and resilient e-commerce Tomcat cluster, transitioned e-commerce search to Apache Solr, established an in-house customer support centre, implemented an ElasticSearch cluster for centralised log-management via Graylog, published native apps across all platforms (Windows, Android, iOS, BlackBerry) and worked daily on code, Linux, SEO & SEM, DevOps while managing a team of 15 highly skilled engineers.

He worked as a freelance Internet consultant and contractor providing IT consulting and architecture-guidance for companies such as Vodacom South Africa, First National Bank, BG Phoenics GmbH, CEDA Botswana, VHV Hannover, DBV Winterthur, Daimlyer-Chrysler/Smart and Standard Bank of South Africa.

Gerd is a proactive, experienced technical development manager, mentor, senior software architect and developer with a track record of delivering quality solutions quickly in the IT-, financial-, telco-, e-commerce- and government-sectors. During his 26 years in the IT industry he has had roles in executive management, development, systems analysis and project management using technologies like Apache Solr, ElasticSearch, Messaging Platforms (MQ Series, SonicMQ), Application Servers (Tomcat, IBM WebSphere, Jetty) and developed in C, Java / J2EE (JSP, Servlets, EJBs), NodeJS, PHP and Perl on a number of large and complex projects.

Gerd holds diplomas in Business Management and Marketing Management from the Damelin Management School (Rosebank, South Africa) as well as in Business Enterprise Studies and Marketing Management from the Institute of Commercial Management (Bournemouth, UK).

He has extensive experience in J2EE technologies ranging from the design and development of complex model-view-controller architectures to the integration of legacy mainframe architectures. He has worked with development tools such as VSCode, PHP Storm, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse / MyEclipseIDE, IBM Websphere Application Developer, Rational Application Developer, Rational Software Architect and has performed deployments and load-balancing exercises on IBM Websphere Application Server, Tomcat and IBM-/Apache-HTTP Server using various performance monitoring tools.

Developing & designing branch-banking solutions

Gerd began his career in 1992 in Krumpendorf, Austria at Uniquare (formerly known as Genesis Software Consulting) where he worked as a C/C++ Lead Programmer on the development of financial branch-banking solutions and successfully implemented the then largest IBM OS/2 branch-banking solution for Standard Bank of South Africa.

Between December 2000 and May 2003, he worked as a consultant for the German company Maas High Tech Software based in Stuttgart to implement large-scale web-applications in the financial industry. Thereafter Gerd was involved in various projects (SAP portals in Botswana, government projects in Germany, retail banking- and telecommunication-solutions in South Africa).

Upon his return to South Africa in June 2004, he joined First National Bank’s branch-banking division as Chief Architect in the FNB BBT Risk & Governance division and headed up the bank’s architecture migration to a thin-client, web-based transactional system supporting 700 outlets and 14,000 users developed in Java.

Architecting call-centre solutions for Vodacom

In 2006 he consulted at Vodacom South Africa as JEE architect and assumed in 2007 the role of Acting Manager Systems Design of the Vodacom Commercial System Group. As the lead architect he was responsible for technical solutions across 12 call-centres, 550 retail franchises and 15,000 users and was instrumental in the migration from the old WebSphere stack, the implementation of open-source solutions, the compliance with PCI and SOX and acted as an evangelist for open source technologies and portal technologies within the organisation.

Building South Africa's largest Java e-commerce platform and marketplace

In 2010 he joined bidorbuy, Africa’s largest e-commerce marketplace, with the mandate to scale up the existing IT infrastructure and create functional teams to run DevOps / IT-operations. Bidorbuy’s e-commerce infrastructure was re-architected to run on a scalable private cloud infrastructure (using CentOS Xen hypervisor running on IBM Bladecenters) with clustered web-applications developed in Java running as fully stateless applications on Tomcat application servers. Several large-scale projects such as Apache Solr for e-commerce search, in-house iOS-/Android-/Windows- & Blackberry native application developed was managed by in-house staff.

Gerd led and personally implemented SEO and SEM projects which included Rich Snippets, Google Tag Manager (including data-layers for e-commerce) and 3rd party product data feeds to Google Merchant Centre, remarketing companies (Criteo, RTB) and affiliates.

A revamped email-infrastucture using Port25 allowed bidorbuy to transmit up to 2 million transactional- and marketing emails per hour. The privately developed Port25 bouncehandler was deployed at bidorbuy and manages all bounce-handling.

Improvements in DevOps comprised the rollout of a centralised log-management system using Graylog, Logstash and Elasticsearch as well as the deployment of a full SDLC suite using Atlassian stack (JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket and Fisheye) with continuous integration of Android and iOS via Jenkins and application performance management via New Relic. Private cloud servers are managed via SaltStack and monitored through Zabbix.

What I strive for:

I enjoy developing and delivering systems but also relish the human side and I get the most out of my work when I am interacting losely with project stakeholders to deliver systems that add value and give a return on investment. I have the ability to motivate and manage my team to ensure the best results.

My emphasis tends to be on creating systems based on sound technical designs. Pragmatism, using sound software engineering principles and applying software patterns are important. Quality and usability are key drivers. I am inclined to use multiple tools or environments to create systems. I have vast experience with a variety of tools, operating systems, development techniques, software products and prefer open-source solutions over commercial options.

I am a professional who likes to work in small teams where I prefer a leading consultative role towards clients and colleagues. During the last 25 years of my career I was regularly involved with the management of my employees and my clients as consultant, sparring partner and critic. I appreciate honesty and clarity without resorting to social engineering or political games. I believe in reaching goals as a collective and sharing the results. When dealing with clients I exhibit a service-oriented- and coaching-approach.

PLACEMENT OPPORTUNITIES: I can add great value and opportunities to your organisation and can be confidently placed in the positions of: Enterprise Architect, team-lead/manager of enterprise-/application-architecture team, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), team-lead/manager/executive of development. I enjoy hands-on work and find myself most of the time in a Linux terminal or IDE.

Preferred location of employment: Austria - Kärnten / Klagenfurt.

Download Gerd Naschenweng’s Personality Assessment
Karriere.at iPersonic Test (Deutsch)

Recent Achievements

  • Reduced the development lifecycle 30% by streamlining processes through the implementation of new SDLC processes, motivating and training employees, upgrading tools and technologies, improving project management, and instilling accountability.
  • Designed PostGres architecture based on EnterpriseDB to migrate the current transactional Oracle Database to EnterpriseDB, avoiding a costly migration to Oracle Enterprise Edition.
  • Held all financial responsibility for product development, implementation, support, and internal servers/network including revenue, utilization, margins and R&D budget.
  • Deployment of Apache Solr search stack for e-commerce search over 3m products with 10ms response time
  • Deployment of ElasticSearch cluster for centralised log-management via Graylog and Logstash processing 600 log-messages per second and realtime JIRA integration for incident management
  • Deployment of e-commerce mail-infrastructure capable of transmitting up to 2m emails per hour
  • Implemented DevOps infrastructure for e-commerce marketplace using Atlassian stack, Zabbix, Salt, PagerDuty, NewRelic and Hipchat
  • Full automation of SDLC and configuration management and continuous integration
  • Implementation of customer support system (Kayako) to service 1,2m customers per month
  • Migration of 500m images in e-commerce product catalogue to Cloudinary
  • Implementation of e-commerce SEO- and SEM tooling including GTM, Merchant Centre integration, Rich cards
  • Migration of WebSphere Portal 6.0 to open-source Liferay
  • Implementation of legislative processes for PCI (Payment Card Industry), SOX and RICA
  • Design and implementation of a webservices gateway for RICA and B2B at a cellular company
  • Migration of WebSphere 5.0 to WebSphere 6.0 at a cellular company
  • Electronic Forms implementation at a large telecommunication company
  • ITIL-champion to provide ITIL-implementation-support in retail-banking
  • Architectural design of future architecture for retail banking branch platform
  • Introduction of complete SDLC in retail bank
  • Technical lead during the hardware selection process and proof of concept for a € 5 million hardware tender
  • Team-lead, performance-measurement and scalability-tests with Mercury LoadRunner for a large EJB government-application.
  • Development of insurance reporting system with SAP Portal Development Kit.
  • Design & Implementation of a data access layer to communicate with the mainframe via CICS Transaction Gateway to invoke legacy CICS Transactions.
  • Design & Implementation of a single-signon solution using JSSE and LDAP with the use of RSA SecurID and Kobil SecOVID tokens.
  • Design and Development of an Internet application to web-enable an insurance company's legacy mainframe applications.

References

Vodacom

2009

Gerd is a first rate J2EE architect with skills in the management of people, vendors and service providers. He has added enormous value to clients by reducing their license revenue spend through innovative approaches and architecting solid solutions. He always has the client's interests at heart. His passion for technology extends beyond his professional capacity.

by a Principal Consultant reporting to me

Vodacom

2009

... the one thing I most enjoy having Gerd as a manager/team lead, is that we as a team can challenge each other to find best ways to solve complex problems. This I would say is greatly attributed to his highly technical knowledge. I have certainly learned a great deal from him and recommend his work with no hesitation.

by a Snr Specialist reporting to me

Vodacom

2008

Gerd has been in a contracting capacity with Vodacom performing vital roles in the establishment of systems architecture, execution of the implementation of architecture, migration of technology platforms centered around the WebSphere stack of technologies as well as other technology platforms. He is highly experienced in systems design, implementation and operation of these systems. He is extremely detail oriented and functions exceptionally well within a team environment as well as in an individual capacity. His relationship with his peers, superiors and direct reports are exceptional. Lastly his breadth of knowledge around information technology is vast, but he still manages an exceptional balance at a detail level in a fast paced environment.

by Executive Head, CSG Systems Division

First National Bank

2006

During my employment at FNB as Head of Development J2EE (February 2004 to May 2005) I had the privilege of working quite closely with Gerd. He was instrumental in contributing to the successful stabilization of the "Cube" Java Framework, selection of a new Branch Automation Platform as well as the successful integration of my team from old to new standards and processes

IBM / Standard Bank of South Africa

1997

... I think the greatest compliment a project manager can offer to a past staf member is the willingness to take that person to a new project: Mr. Naschenweng remains at the top of my list.

Professional Experience

Techlead & Development Manager

Dec 2018 - Present
Alturos Destinations, Klagenfurt am Wörthersee (Austria)

Business case:

Alturos Destinations provides with it’s Peaksolution platform e-commerce and digitalization solutions for the tourism industry in the Alpine regions of Europe. As the Techlead and Development Manager for Peaksolution my role involves the management of the development pipeline across 6 teams with 30+ engineers on-site and a member remote-team located in Ukraine.

With 25+ e-commerce installations across Austria, Italy, Germany, France and Switzerland I manage all development initiatives within Peaksolution for the responsive, mobile and self-service channels. A highly agile team of engineers delivers up to 15 software releases per week.

The responsibilities include the technical lead and coordination of the B2B-, B2C-, API-, MyServices-, BI/DWH- and Integration-team and to be the interface to customers, project management, product management and support channels across the organisation.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Non-disclosure
  • Management of 30+ engineering staff covering all software development for the Peaksolution™ e-tourism platform.
Technologies used: PHP, Java, Kubernetes / Docker, LAMP, Kafka, MariaDB/MySQL in an agile environment using the Atlassian stack (JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo) and a vast number of integrations with 3rd party providers of touristic services.

Chief Technology Officer

Mar 2010 - Nov 2018
bidorbuy.co.za, Johannesburg (South Africa)

Business case:

The main focus was to completely restructure bidorbuy’s IT-operations which consisted in 2010 of five non-redundant servers without monitoring, backups or any DevOps. With limited budget the whole Java/Tomcat stack was reworked and deployed on high-available Xen clusters running on IBM BladeCenter infrastructure. The IT-team of three staff was upskilled to multi-functional teams consisting of 16 highly-skilled engineers who independently manage DevOps, mobile development (Android and iOS) and core Java development.

An agile development process with continous integration using Atlassian JIRA, Bitbucket, Confluence, Jenkins was implemented to allow multiple deployments per day.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Migration of Oracle Standard Edition transactional database to PostGres EnterpriseDB
  • Private cloud-hosted IT architecture based on open-source technology (Apache, Tomcat, Java, Xen, CentOS)
  • Performance tuning and optimisation of Java stack / Java Virtual Machine for Tomcat and Apache Solr to reduce GC-cycles, memory leaks and improve response times
  • Implementation of e-commerce SEO- and SEM tooling including GTM, Merchant Centre integration, Rich cards
  • Implementation of native e-commerce apps for Windows, Android, iOS, Blackberry
  • Deployment of Apache Solr search stack for e-commerce search on 3,7m products with 10ms response time per query
  • Deployment of ElasticSearch cluster for centralised log- & incident management via Graylog and Logstash processing 600msg/sec
  • Deployment of e-commerce mail-infrastructure (PowertMTA / Port25) capable of transmitting up to 2m emails per hour
  • Implemented DevOps infrastructure for e-commerce marketplace (New Relic, SaltStack, Zabbix, PagerDuty and in-house incident reporting)
  • Full automation of SDLC and configuration management and continous integration using Jenkins and Atlassian (JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, Bitbucket) on Java (MyEclipseIDE)
  • Implementation of customer support system (Kayako) to service 1,2m customers per month
  • Migration of 500m images in e-commerce product catalogue to Cloudinary
  • Migration of all sites to SSL without loss of SEO ranking
  • Management of 15 IT-staff covering all IT- and Ops-projects within the company
Technologies used: Apache HTTP, Apache Solr, CentOS7, ElasticSearch, Freemarker, Graylog, GROK, Java, JAX-RS, Jersey, jQuery, JSP, Logstash, MailWizz, MySQL, New Relic APM, Nginx, Oracle, Perl, PHP, PowerMTA, SaltStack, Tomcat
ubuntudeal.co.za - UbuntuDeal - Social Groupbuying

Director

Apr 2011 - Jul 2013
ubuntudeal.co.za, Cape Town (South Africa)

Business case:

Director for UbuntuDeal group buying (Groupon clone) with the focus on strategic Consulting, brand development, web site traffic growth, SEO and coordinating new development initiatives.

Technologies used: Apache HTTP, MySQL, PHP

Java/J2EE Solutions Architect and Design Manager

Jan 2006 - Feb 2010
Vodacom South Africa, Midrand (South Africa)

Business case:

Initially hired to design and implement a customer acquisition solution. Moved as acting manager and solutions architect into the design team and took over responsibility for application- and infrastructure architecture-solutions for Vodacom’s customer channels (consumer, corporate, call-centres) comprising of 12 call-centres, 550 retail franchises and 15,000 users. Instrumental in the migration from old WebSphere stack, the implementation of a standardised webservices gateway and various cost-savings and open-source initiatives.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Responsible for managing the design team and defining architectural roadmaps and introducing technology enablers to maintain the company’s competitive edge.
  • Design/implementation of acquisition and score-card systems running on JEE standards
  • Evaluation of replacement for Websphere product stack with Open Source solutions
  • SOA initiatives to establish a service registry & repository, an enterprise integration bus
  • Design/implementation of webservices gateway for B2B transactions
  • Commercial negotiations with vendors (RFP, SOW, budgets)
  • Application infrastructure design
  • Design of a pre-production environment based on virtualisation technology comprising 16 logical partitions resembling five different pre-production environments
  • SDLC and process improvement projects
  • Design/implementation of Vodacom Business portal
  • Implementation of legislative processes for PCI (Payment Card Industry), SOX and RICA -Management of design team (15 employees), budgets, interactions with C-level and executive management
Technologies used: Alfresco, IBM DB2, IBM DB2 Content Manager, IBM Lotus Forms, IBM MQSeries, IBM Secureway LDAP, IBM WebSphere 6.x Application Server (AIX, Windows), IBM WebSphere 6.x Portal Server, IBM WebSphere Process Server, J2EE (DAO, Business Delegates, Entity Beans, Session Beans, Message Driven Beans), Liferay, WSAD 5.x, WSAD IE 5.x, RAD 7.x, RSA 7.x

Chief Architect - Risk & Governance

Jul 2004 - Jan 2006
First National Bank - South Africa, Johannesburg (South Africa)

Business case:

Initially consulted as a Java/J2EE architect to implement architectural principles in the technology division of Branch Banking. Branch Banking Technology services a branch network consisting of 700 outlets and supports over 14,000 users. During the first engagement the scope of work changed to apply enterprise architecture principles, to streamline the software development life-cycle and to establish an IT strategy to support future business initiatives.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Resolved stability and performance issues in the current environment and improved scalability from 50 concurrent users to 1500 users.
  • Assisted the infrastructure team with the design and implementation of a fully automated, clustered and fail-over Blade Centre environment.
  • Architectural principles for SDLC supporting Risk & Governance
  • Prepared and presented several business cases to support the improvement of the SDLC (Change Management, Problem Management, Application- & System Monitoring, Test Management).
  • Facilitated the RFI/RFP process to replace the current branch software stack.
  • Development of architecture strategy and roadmap to transform branch technology.
  • Key-player in Risk & Governance to implement policies, guidelines and processes.
  • Assisted in the ITIL assessment and provided recommendations. (ITIL champion for implementation)
  • Architectural design of system infrastructure and involvement in Linux vs Windows proof-of-concepts.
  • Definition of architectural roadmaps for Identity Management, Peripheral Integration via J/XFS.
  • Business-case & implementation of web-presence/-usage monitoring in a Blade environment.
Technologies used: IBM AIX 5.2, IBM DB2, IBM WebSphere 5.x (AIX, Linux), IBM Tivoli Directory Services, Mercury LoadRunner, Novell SLES (8.x, 9.x), OpenSuse 10.0, Suse 9.3. Quick Test Pro, Redhat RHEL (2.x, 3.x), Rational Software Architect, Rational Application Developer, Telelogic CM Change, Telelogic ChangeSynergy, WebSphere Application Developer 5.x

Architect, Snr. Java Developer – Quality Assurance

Mar 2004 - Jun 2004
BG|Phoenics, Munich (Germany)

Business case:

BG Phoenics GmbH has developed a J2EE application for different social insurance groups in Germany. Scope of the project to perform system-testing during which the delivery project is evaluated for “production-readiness”.

BG Phoenic’s application is a document-centric solution which required scanning, recognition, indexing and management of 60,000 documents per hour.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Setup and extension of quality assuring activities.
  • Performance optimisation and troubleshooting for applications.
  • Development and customisation of LoadRunner scripts.
  • Utilisation of privately developed “UniversalServer” - an extensible client-server framework to control load tests.
  • Performance measurement and profiling using Wily Introscope.
  • Performance tuning / problem resolution
  • Performance tuning of infrastructure environment (especially MQ Workflow, DB2, IBM Websphere and JVM, Content Manager)
  • Analysis of LoadRunner-test results.
Technologies used: AIX, ANT, Eclipse 3.0, IBM DB2, IBM Content Manager (AIX / z/OS), IBM MQ Series Workflow, IBM Secureway (LDAP), IBM WebSphere 4.07 (AIX, Solaris), ISIS Papyrus, jadClipse, Java, Mercury LoadRunner 7.8, Shell-scripting, Unix, Wily Introscope, yGuard Obfuscator

Technical Team leader – Quality Assurance

Sep 2003 - Feb 2004
BG|Phoenics, Munich (Germany)

Business case:

BG Phoenics GmbH has developed a J2EE application for different social insurance groups in Germany. Scope of the project is to support the production readiness project for the company during the hardware-tender process, mediate between the different hardware providers and produce results to facilitate the hardware selection process.

BG Phoenic’s application is a document-centric solution which required scanning, recognition, indexing and management of 60,000 documents per hour.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Setup and extension of quality assuring activities.
  • Performance optimisation and troubleshooting for applications.
  • Management and co-ordination of the test-team (7 people).
  • Development and customisation of LoadRunner scripts.
  • Development of additional LoadRunner functionality to generate even load in test scenarios.
  • Analysis of LoadRunner-test results.
Technologies used: AIX, ANT, Eclipse 3.0, IBM DB2, IBM Content Manager (AIX / z/OS), IBM MQ Series Workflow, IBM Secureway (LDAP), IBM WebSphere 4.07 (AIX, Solaris), ISIS Papyrus, jadClipse, Java, Mercury LoadRunner 7.8, Shell-scripting, Unix, Wily Introscope, yGuard Obfuscator

SAP-portal & Java Consultant

Aug 2003 - Sep 2003
ceda.co.bw, via ATOS KPMG, Gaborone (Botswana)

Business case:

The Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (= CEDA) is a government-funded agency to develop the business development in Botswana. The core business of CEDA focuses on the distribution of loans in the commercial-, property-, agricultural- and livestock sectors. The project included a loan-origination and appraisal process which interfaces into SAP and utilises the SAP portal server to present the web-based business application to the end-user.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Technical assistance in the last 4 weeks of the implementation phase to implement the appraisal models for commercial-, property- and agricultural loans.
  • Design of the database model and generic access beans to store/retrieve business data via JDBC.
  • Development of SAP portal-components (DynPage and JSPDynPage).
  • Unit- and load-test of the components via JUnit.
Technologies used: Apache Tomcat 3.3, ANT, J2EE, Java JDK 1.3, JDBC, JSP, JUnit, MySQL, Oracle, SAP Portal Development Kit 5.0.5, Servlets, Windows 2000 Server

Senior J2EE Architect / Developer / Team leader

Dec 2002 - Jun 2003
VHV Allgemeine Versicherung AG, Hannover (Germany)

Business case:

The Internet-application implemented under Visual Age for Java 3.5 and deployed on IBM Websphere Application Server 3.5 needed to be migrated to fully support the J2EE deployment standards. The project includes the migration of libraries and deployment scripts.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Technical assistance in migration of the Visual Age repository to IBM WebSphere Application Developer 5.0.
  • Design of automated J2EE deployment into WebSphere Application Server 4.0 via ANT and Tcl and Jacl.
  • Technical project management and coaching (managing a team of 5 developers, project-planning, business analysis/design).
  • Performance and scalability tests via Mercury Loadrunner.
  • Production link: https://maxnet.vhv.de
Technologies used: ANT, J2EE, Java JDK 1.3, JSP, IBM CICS Transaction Gateway, IBM Common Connector Framework, IBM HTTP Server, IBM Websphere Application Developer (WSAD) 4.1 & 5.0, IBM Websphere Application Server 3.5 / 4.0 / 5.0, Jacl, Servlets, TCL, Windows 2000 Server, XML

Senior J2EE Architect / Developer / Team leader

Sep 2002 - Dec 2002
VHV Allgemeine Versicherung AG, Hannover (Germany)

Business case:

A web-portal application should allow multiple insurance companies to share different authentication methods and provide a single-signon (SSO) for all partner applications. For this project a user is authentified and authorised via RSA SecurID or Kobil SecOVID and user-information is stored in LDAP.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Design and development of a model-view-controller application framework for the company.
  • Design and development of a Java Native Interface to communicate with the RSA- and Kobil-Servers for authentication.
  • Design and development of a XML-based configurable authentication framework.
  • Performance and scalability tests via Mercury Loadrunner.
  • Production link: https://www.vdg-portal.de
Technologies used: ANT, C/C++, J2EE, Java JDK 1.3, JSP, IBM CICS Transaction Gateway, IBM Common Connector Framework, IBM HTTP Server, IBM Websphere Application Developer (WSAD) 4.0, IBM Websphere Application Server 4.0, HTML, Kobil SecOVID, Jacl, JavaScript, JNI, JSSE, JSP, LDAP, RSA SecurID, Servlets, TCL, Windows 2000 Server, XML

Senior J2EE Architect / Developer / Team leader

Mar 2001 - Sep 2002
VHV Allgemeine Versicherung AG, Hannover (Germany)

Business case:

Establish an Internet-portal to provide the insurance companies business processes to their insurance brokers and partners. The portal’s functionality covers all aspects of an insurance-brokers requirements (change insurance details, customer details, file damage reports, enquiry of insurance contracts etc.).

Scope of work & projects:

  • Design and development of a model-view-controller application framework (XML based “Struts”-like MVC model 2) for the company.
  • Design and development of the Java Middletier (servlets, Javabeans, JSP) to communicate with the mainframe via CICS Transaction Gateway to invoke legacy CICS transactions.
  • Design and development of a XML-based communication infrastructure to transform COBOL copybooks into XML-beans.
  • Design and development of a reporting framework based on Apache FOP to generate/transform PDF-documents and serve the documents via the browser.
  • Design and development of a distributed Logging-Framework based on Apache Log4J and IBM MQSeries.
  • Load balancing and scalability tests of the application via Mercury Loadrunner. -Project production link: http://maxnet.vhv.de
Technologies used: ANT, Apache FOP, C/C++, J2EE, Java Applets, Java JDK 1.3, JSP, IBM CICS Transaction Gateway, IBM Common Connector Framework, IBM HTTP Server, IBM Websphere Application Server 4.0, IBM Visual Age for Java 3.5 / 4.0, HTML, JavaScript, JNI, JSSE, JSP, LDAP, Log4J, Mercury LoadRunner, Servlets, TCL, Windows 2000 Server, Xalan, XML, XSLT

Senior J2EE Architect / Developer

Nov 2000 - Feb 2001
DBV Winterthur Insurance, Wiesbaden (Germany)

Business case:

Proof of concept for the development of a web-based document management system. The project focused on the automatic processing of documents (letter, emails, fax etc.) via a web interface. Back-end processes included the archiving of new documents into a document server and retrieval functions to access documents from the optical Jukeboxes.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Design and development of a web-based application to retrieve document information from the mainframe via MQ Series and display the documents in a browser.
  • Integration of APIs to retrieve documents via a servlet from optical storage.
  • Development of a 3270 applet to enable users to capture additional information on in 3270 applications.
  • Load tests with Mercury LoadRunner
Technologies used: Allaire JRun, Corba, EJB, IBM MQ Series, IBM Visual Age for Java 3.5, IONA iPAS, Java Applet, Java JDK 1.2, J2EE, JSP, Mercury LoadRunner, Servlets, Sun Solaris, Tomcat, XML

Technical Project Manager

Aug 2000 - Nov 2000
Smart.com - MCC / Daimler-Chrysler, Renningen & Stuttgart (Germany)

Business case:

The Smart.com Microcompact Car Company (a Daimler-Chrysler company) manufactures and distributes in a franchise model the compact Smart-cars. In a restructuring exercise the company focused on launches into new markets.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Project management and coordination of the IT-franchise setup for the new market launches in UK, Japan and Taiwan.
  • Setup of change-management procedures to coordinate the distribution of new functionality and updates to franchise outlets.
  • Co-ordination and setup of a project office and delegation of tasks to team-leaders / project managers.
Technologies used: Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project

Senior System Analyst / Designer / Developer

Jan 2000 - Jul 2000
SBSA - Standard Bank South Africa, Johannesburg (South Africa)

Business case:

Proof of concept to move the existing OS/2 based branch delivery system to a platform independent format.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Analysis, Design and Feasibility study to migrate a large (350+ branches) banking client-server system to Java.
  • Development of a Java interface to communicate and exchange data with the mainframe via IBM CICS Transaction Gateway.
Technologies used: Java JDK 1.1.8, IBM CICS Transaction Gateway, IBM Common Connector Framework, IBM OS/2 Warp 4.0, IBM Visual Age for Java 3.5, XML

Senior System Analyst / Designer / Developer

Jun 1996 - Jan 2000
SBSA - Standard Bank South Africa, Johannesburg (South Africa)

Business case:

Enhancing the OS/2 based client-server application to implement additional functionality to increase productivity at the banks branches.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Integration of the new Y2K compliant credit-card processing system.
  • Management of implementation and rollout of major functional changes to the frontend system to all retail outlets.
  • Analysis, Design and Implementation of the Instant Card Issue functionality to issue (print & encode) ATM cards in the branches.
  • Management of the deployment of 200 card printers into the branch network (400+ branches).
  • Analysis, Design and Implementation of the Teller System, which allows the banks branches to handle all monetary transactions real-time.
  • Analysis, Design and Implementation of the “plug ‘n play” Serial Port Interface, which enables the “hot-plugging” of any serial device. (This was implemented to launch new hardware quickly and to reduce administration and configuration efforts). As part of this project cash-dispensers, card-readers, cheque-readers and card-printers were deployed to 400+ branches nationwide.
  • Analysis, Design and Implementation of the Print Monitor Interface which extends/replaces the functionality of the OS/2 Print Manager. Purpose of the project was to increase the speed of documents printed and to manage 5000+ printers in the branch network.
Technologies used: APPC, APPN, C / C++, IBM Communication Manager, IBM OS/2 2.x / 3.x / 4.x, IBM Lanserver / Requestor, IO subsystems, IBM Presentation Manager API, IBM Universal Database

Lead Programmer / Senior Developer / Analyst

Sep 1992 - Jun 1996
UNiQUARE, Krumpendorf (Austria)

Business case:

Analysis, Design and Software-development of business functionality for the Standard Bank of South Africa project.

Scope of work & projects:

  • Analysis, Design and Implementation of the Customer Information System to manage customer information and utilise key data for marketing purposes.
  • Cross Selling Interface to support customer consultants in their marketing efforts.
  • Development of the support-tool “BDRemote/32” to remotely control 800+ servers and 10,000+ desktops in the bank’s branch infrastructure.
Technologies used: APPC, APPN, C / C++, IBM Communication Manager, IBM OS/2 2.x / 3.x / 4.x, IBM Lanserver / Requestor, IO subsystems, IBM Presentation Manager API, IBM Universal Database

Projects

Most projects are under NDA. Publicly shared projects are shared below:

Centralised log management via ElasticSearch - Designed and implemented a fully integrated open source log management platform for collecting, indexing, and analyzing both structured and unstructured data from all application- and transactional servers.
bidorbuy enterprise e-commerce search - Designed and implemented a highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant search and indexing architecture based on Apache Solr, Jetty, CentOS 7 and JDK 18. The search architecture powers the search and navigation features of all bidorbuy applications (web, iOS, Android, Blackberry) and processes search queries in less than 35ms per query.
PowerMTA bouncehandler - Port25 PowerMTA bounce handler for Interspire and MailWizz.
Graylog JIRA plugin - A Graylog JIRA plugin which allows the automatic logging of JIRA tasks based on Graylog messages logged.
Docker - Smokeping - A Docker image using Smokeping for advanced network monitoring.
Gunbot Docker Edition for Synology NAS - Docker Image for the Gunbot Crypto Trading Bot using minimal GlibC image with colorised output
iterm-oh-my-zsh-powerlevel10k - Improved Terminal Experience with Oh My Zsh, iTerm2, PowerLevel10K
PiHoleCloudFlareD - Raspberry Pi setup with Pi-Hole, CloudflareD, DHCP as the ultimate Ad-blocker

Publications

Most publications are under NDA, publicly shared publications are shared below:

How bidorbuy reduced R&D costs and improved site performance
Migrated our proprietary thumbnail generation and storage to Cloudinary CDN using named transformations to generate thumbnails dynamically as and when needed. Images are optimised based on delivery platform (i.e. high-res retina images on Apple retina devices) and with automatic browser detection images are delivery optimised to reduce bandwidth (i.e. automatic WebP delivery).
BidorBuy: A Major Part of South Africa’s Internet Boom
Migration of bidorbuy DNS services to Dyn.com.
One of Europe’s Largest Java Applications is Looking for a Home
Performance & Scalability Testing to evaluate hardware infrastructure for one of Germany's largest document- & claims-processing projects

Skills & Proficiency

Skill-levels are rated on a percentage scale: 100%=Expert, 80%=Advanced, 60%=Thorough, 40%=Working understanding, 20%=Limited understanding:

Industry Knowledge

Automotive
Financial Industry – Banking
Financial Industry – Insurance
Government – Business Development
Government – Healthcare / Social
Telecommunications

Operating Systems

Linux / Unix variants
Macintosh OS X
Windows Client (2000, XP, 7/8/10)

Databases

MySQL
ODBC / JDBC
Oracle
PostGres
IBM DB/2 & IBM Universal Database

Programming Skills

Java Programming
J2EE - General Knowledge
J2EE - Webservices
J2EE - JSP, JSF, Portal development
APM (New Relic, Introscope, JVM- &, heap-tuning)
PHP, Perl, Ruby, NodeJS
Portal technologies (SAP, WebSphere)
C / C++
XML, XSL, SAX, DOM, Markdown
Deployment scripting (ANT, Gulp, Tcl / Tk / Jacl / Gradle)

System Software — Application- & Web-servers

IBM HTTP Server, Apache HTTP Server, NGINX
IBM Websphere Application Server 5.x / 6.x / 7.x
JBOSS
Tomcat 7.x / 8.x

System Software — Networks & Security

Docker
ElasticSearch, Graylog, Logstash, Fluentbit
IBM CICS Transaction Gateway
IBM MQ Series
Interprocess Communication (pipes, queues, semaphores)
TCP/IP, Sockets, SMTP, POP, HTTP, FTP

Tooling & Productivity

Charting (Visio, Gliffy, Omnigraffle)
Design (UML)
Eclipse, MyEclipseIDE
Editors (Atom.io, TextWrangler, Vi/VIM, Sublime, VSCode)
Incident Management (JIRA, HP ServiceDesk)
Microsoft Office 365 (Windows / Mac)
Rational Application Developer / Software Architect
SCM (CVS, Github, Gitlab, Telelogic, Bitbucket, Clearcase)
Testing (Mercury, jUnit, jMeter)

Other Skills

Analysis / Design
Data Modeling / ERD-design
Enterprise Architecture / Architectural Design
Team Leading / Management / Project Management

Web Analytics

Google Analytics
Google Tag Manager
Technical SEO & SEM
3rd party analytics (Webtrekk, Omniture / Adobe Analytics / Kissmetrics)