Jako Heiberg

The single developer on a project team of roughly a hundred — the rest business analysts, testers, and project managers. The work was mostly integration: making a third party's code speak fluently to internal APIs that long predated it.

• ▸Tied a third-party codebase into Sanlam's existing internal APIs, so it retrieved and manipulated data through the systems already in place rather than around them
• ▸Built an entitlements API for the in-house call centre — which agent may release which documents to which customer, a question that only looks simple until you write it down
• ▸Java service, containerised with Docker and shipped through CI/CD to Kubernetes, where it still runs

Led specialist initiatives across security, performance, and infrastructure for a Telco provisioning system used by Cisco, British Telecoms, New York State, and others. The phrase "critical telecommunications infrastructure" was used frequently and earnestly.

• ▸Built automated translation pipeline, because no one wants to update 47 language files by hand
• ▸Partnered with Cisco to identify and close security vulnerabilities before they became incidents
• ▸Managed incident response for server outages, security threats, and performance degradation — usually in that order
• ▸Orchestrated platform migration from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 before the end-of-life situation became a headline

Managed an 8-person team with the company's highest issue closure rate and lowest defect rate. Both numbers were tracked. Only one was celebrated loudly enough.

• ▸Promoted two team members into leadership roles; watched them inherit the same headaches, but with better titles
• ▸Developed three engineers into highly skilled specialists — one became the top Perl developer in the company, which is a compliment that has aged interestingly
• ▸Delivered all projects on time and within budget — a fact sufficiently remarkable that people kept mentioning it
• ▸Handled recruitment, CV screening, interviewing, probation goals, and performance reviews
• ▸Ran Scrum with Agilefant for tracking; the retrospectives were honest

Feature development and maintenance on an extremely complex Telco provisioning system — "extremely complex" being the vendor's words and also an understatement.

• ▸Maintained a polyglot codebase in Perl, Python, Java, and XML — not always by choice
• ▸Built Java API layer for backend integration via JEE WebServices on Glassfish — at a time when this was the reasonable choice
• ▸Designed event-driven transaction messaging over JMS, SMTP, and WebServices

Telecommunications billing systems — the kind where every edge case is someone's money, and the bugs have consequences measured in rands.

• ▸Optimised Automated Reconciliation system through strategic multithreading (single-threaded was not reconciling fast enough)
• ▸Developed Inbound Billing System and Carrier Price Listing components
• ▸Built Xcopy deep-copy system for franchise contract replication across the Telco industry
• ▸Started experimenting with JavaScript and Ajax — this, in retrospect, was inevitable

Designed enterprise solutions for Vodacom across fraud detection, call data analysis, and process management.

• ▸Built DataPix — a graphical fraud detection system with serious mathematical ambitions
• ▸Designed and developed Call Data Records query system for Vodacom's operations
• ▸Wrote business proposals and technical white papers — the readable kind

A formative stretch spanning local government systems, a live auction site for Naspers (Swing + EJB + XML, long before anyone had opinions about microservices), and a call-centre tool at Old Mutual maintaining R5m+ annual income potential.

• ▸Led team on local government system covering Project Management, Stock, and Job Management under ISO 9001
• ▸Designed and built a web-based live auction site from scratch — front-to-back, Java all the way down
• ▸Did business analysis at PQAfrica for interfaces between the Lamda product and legacy systems (the exits were important)

Eleven years in civil engineering, the last several of which involved writing software before it was officially part of the job description.

• ▸Built a sewer design program that reduced a 1–2 week task to 1–2 hours. Management flagged this as "non-productive." Productivity increased noticeably. The report is still out there somewhere.
• ▸Designed civil engineering services and housing schemes including Franskraal and early phases of Myburgh Park, Langebaan
• ▸Trained 10+ technicians on Digital Terrain Model software — all survived
• ▸Earlier still, in 1980: a statistical program for managing railway tracks at SA Transport Services — the first of many programs that made someone's job smaller