Danie Roux

Professional Experience

• Team Lead · Devstream · Sandton

  November 2005 - Present

  I am the team lead of the Technical Core team.

  Devstream currently employs close to 40 developers split into small teams of 4-6 people.

  The technical core team builds and maintains the infrastructure that those teams use. We serve as an architecture clearing house, ensuring that a central place for architectural decisions and implementations exist.

  Our duties include, but are not limited to:

  • Creation of architectural guidelines and the frameworks to support those.
  • Specifying the development environment and the tools to be used.
  • Researching and deciding on frameworks to use.
  • Developing of the deployment mechanisms and the setup of the hosting environment.

  I played a major role in the architecture since the inception of the project.

  We follow Extreme Programming (XP) as our software development methodology. In that capacity I have done presentations on XP.

• Portal and Web Integration Specialist · University of Pretoria · Pretoria

  February 2003 - October 2005

  The position of Portal and Web Integration Specialist was a new one created specifically to investigate the use of portal technologies to form a unified work environment for both lecturers and students.

  As part of this job I investigated the portal technology landscape and recommended certain technologies and the strategy we should pursue. This strategy included single signon practices and a unified view of all person data.

  I served on the Database Workgroup where I proposed a solution to the problem of person data being spread over disparate datasources all over the University. This proposal included authentication and authorisation of students, lecturers and third party entities.

  Part of the job specification included developing a standard development environment. I created this standard development environment using Hibernate, Struts, Jetty and Spring as the framework to tie it all together. Applications are self-contained with no external dependencies, aside from Java and Eclipse.

  I also defined the deployment model and the Subversion repository workflow. This allows clean deploys from the source repository onto the production servers.

  I was also responsible for implementing a new content management system for the University of Pretoria's web pages. On this project I did the technology selection, the source code modifications necessary as well as the initial information architecture.

  I was the WebCT and Virtual Campus administrator. My duties there included ensuring that the environment remained stable and doing troubleshooting when things went wrong. This system had more than 34000 students with 2.1 million individual logins in 2004.

• Multimedia Programmer · University of Pretoria · Pretoria

  January 2001 - January 2003

  I was originally appointed to do programming tasks for multimedia projects. I worked myself into the position where I was the expert programmer on the Learning Management System in use at the University of Pretoria (WebCT).

  I was on the project team that created the Virtual Campus for the university. I participated in requirement analysis and system design.

  Further, I wrote the Java connector to the Learning Management System. Our integration with this Learning Management System was the first of its kind in South Africa.

  I attended two WebCT conferences in South Africa, giving presentations at both.