Solution Architect

The following list describes the achievements categorized by responsibility

• Understanding Requirements
• Translated individual requirements into a broader vision
• Addressed technical challenges and proposed alternatives
• Challenged requirements that were presented as solutions
• Designing / Integrating solutions
• Designed a wide range of solutions including validation, increased stability, data retention and features like: Packages, Entity Standards, Parameter Customizability and Dynamic Parameters
• API first design of all (10+) public interfaces
• Risk Management
• Identified risks and mitigation strategies
• Identified a major risk in data quality and supplied both requirements and solutions to mitigate that risk.
• Collaboration
• Align cross domain solutions with developers, architects and analysts from all affected domains.
• Shared API Guidelines with architects to get them approved by the team/ guild responsible for API integration in general.
• Documentation
• Keep LeanIX data up to date
• Created request for comment (RFC) documents (20+)
• Created architectural decision records (ADR)
• Keep PPA Domain architecture documentation up to date
• Communication
• Discuss solutions with both technical and non-technical stake holders
• Challenge PO or BA solutions including defending alternatives for the Architecture committee.
• Project Management
• As a member of project leadership supply and contribute to long term vision
• Together with PO prioritize workload and find the right balance in addressing features, technical dept, compliance and NFR’s
• Support and Guidance
• Solve operation issues through analysis and reasoning
• Organized weekly sessions with developers to share designs and give context and to allow developers to challenge proposals early on.
• Guide developers to the right patterns/approaches to address implementation inefficiencies.

Initially Minto was hired to convert AS-400 based CL applications to the Google Cloud. It quickly became clear that the existing G4 solution lacked important As-400 features. Soon after that the team name was rebranded from CL team to AS-400 team and additional people were added to the team.

Due to his expertise and vision Minto quickly became the Lead engineer for the AS-400. During his time on the team Minto accomplished the following:

• Designed a strategy to what the converted CL programs should look like in Java.
• Added support for the CL goto concept in Java.
• Added support for MONMSG CL exception handling Java, even though Java exception handling proved not to fit the AS-400 functionality.
• Created tooling (cl-scraper) to convert CL command documentation into skeleton implementations of converted CL commands.
• Created tooling (rce – Remote Compile Execute) to run small CL test applications remotely on AS-400 without the need to switch between environments.
• Implemented many CL commands
• Designed concepts to make hardcoded endpoints for FTP/SFTP/CDSND in CL and Cobol configurable.
• Added support for AS-400 QShell by using the linux shell with command rewrite rules.
• Designed and implemented support for AS-400 DataQueues, supporting multiple implementations (Memory and Kafka)
• Presented solutions to be able to chop up large monolithic applications in smaller horizontally scalable pieces.
• Guided new team members to prevent them from drowning in the complexities of the AS-400. And have them productive as soon as possible.
• Organized and moderated daily standups to be able to track progress.
• Helped the RPG team to make the transition from their limited implementation to the richer G4 AS400 environment

With the AuthorizationHub (AH) Minto took an API First approach. Where he first described the external and internel interfaces (API) of the authorization hub based on Rest principles. To formalise this approahc he introduced OpenAPI, as a result the interface is not only well documented, but can also maintained quite easily under version control.

Minto has applied a "pluggable" approach to the implementation, as a result underlying authorization systems can be added by means of a plugin. The result is that new authorization providers can be added without having to adjust the AH itself.

A CI / CD pipeline has been set up so new versions can, quickly and automatically, be rolled out to a (Pivotal) Cloud Foundry environment. Buzzword Bingo: Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, Azure Cloud Methods/techniques: Soap, Rest, Xml, JSON, Scrum, TDD, BDD, AOP, CI, CD, API first Tools: Git, Jenkins, Maven, Swagger / OpenAPI, Cucumber, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, (Pivotal) Cloud Foundry, Microsoft Azure, WireMock, JWT

By introducing an abstract API layer to SCUPA, Minto has contributed to decoupling the existing authorization system backend from it user applications. Previously, various user applications of authorization data had direct access to the authorization database. Due to the abstraction layer, the imple-mentation has been decoupled of the usage, but it has also enabled monitoring of data access and manipulation for auditing purposes.

He has also played an important role in automating the software delivery process and the transition to a DevOps-based way of working. By introducing a fully automated build and deployment process (CI/CD), dependence on the traditional OPS engineer has been reduced. This has made it possible to act considerably faster to incidents and sometimes even roll out new versions the same day.

Buzzword Bingo: Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, Azure Cloud Methods/techniques: Soap, Rest, Xml, JSON, MessageQueueing, Scrum, TDD, BDD, AOP, CI, CD Tools: Subversion, Git, GitHub, Jenkins, Maven, XL Deploy, Swagger, Cucumber, AspectJ, Spring

Project Digimelding and Reva

For Digimelding Minto designed and realized a solution for annotating existing data using Semantic Web standards. This solution was called AStore and encompassed a system capable of storing generic RDF based annotations in a Graph database in a controller way with the option of querying this data with predefined named queries. The AStore turned out o be so generic that is could easily be used for project Reva to store different annotations. Considering the budget and the time constraints the result turned out to be extremely stable and reliable. This despite the number of participating countries and users exceeded the initial expectations.

Technology being used:

• Semantic web and related technology like: RDF, Sparql, W3C Open Annotation, Apache Clerezza, Apache Jena, Apache Stanbol, Openlink Virtuoso
• Component based development using OSGi, Apache Karaf, Docker
• Development tools like: Git, Github, Jenkins, Maven, Apache Jmeter, Vagrant, Ansible
• Front-end development using: Html, CSS and Apache Wicket
• Software metrics and visualization using: DropWizard metrics, Influx DB and Grafana
• Domain driven development using: Apache ISIS

Due to stability and scalability improvements Minto was rewarded commit rights for Apache Clerezza.

Due to his technical expertise Minto launched proposals for improving both application performance and development speed. As a result of this Minto was assigned supervision of a highly specialized team to implement several of these improvements. Some parts of the application improved 400%. These improvements were crucial for acceptance of the application by large clients.

The following enhancements and improvements were build under his technical supervision:

• Mobipol Interface • Gis Interface • Telephony Interface • Tranforming internal message broadcast mechanism into a publish/subscribe message broker. • Introducing abstraction layers to transform parts of the monolithic application into reusable and replaceable components. • Defining and documenting component interfaces and making these components accessible from multiple programming languages (both C++ and Tcl). • Build process, unit testing and software metrics (code coverage) were streamlined and automated.

(While employed at Logica).

On this project Minto began as an team-member, since the preferred roles where already occupied by others. As a result of his technical skills Minto was soon promoted to technically design the application. Besides designing Minto implemented the majority of the most complex parts of the application.

Minto was subsequently promoted from team leader to technical manager in a number of subprojects. In acknowledgement of his knowledge and ideas for the Call Centre application, Minto was asked to join the Design Office for the entire Telfort account.

Due to his skills Minto was regarded by the 45-man project team as the company•s walking encyclopaedia with regards to ActiveX, COM, Microsoft Windows 9x/NT and the developed Call Centre Application. Due to his analytical skills and commitment Minto was frequently requested to assist with getting technically grounded sub-projects back on track.