System designer and developer at Telia Promotor AB

During my time at Promotor I used a lot of different computer programming languages on different computer platforms. I learned a lot about project management and professional business conduct, as well as the difficulties of making people in different parts of the country work together in spite of tight schedules, lack of time, conflicting personal chemistry and uncertain priorities. I also had the pleasure of tutoring a pair of undergraduate students through their thesis work titled "Single sign-on in corporate web portals".

WWW technology

I participated in several projects designing and scaling high-throughput WWW-based services, such as portals, one-to-one business and intranet solutions. This included system design as well as configuration of third-party software, hardware and sometimes even networks.
Computer programming technology that I used range from user interface design in HTML, client-side interactivity using Javascript and Java applets and server-side interactivity using server-side Javascript, Java Server Pages, Java servlets and Microsofts ASP.
C and C++ were also common in the server-side interfaces to various support systems, LDAP directories and databases.
Some examples of projects I've been involved in:

• 118118 Online. A web-based Yellow- and White pages search of telephone numbers register in Sweden.
  I participated in doing the system design, configuring the web server, configuring the application server and setting up of the development-, test- and production platforms. We used JSP and Java Servlets on top of a third-party application server and JDBC with transaction management on both client- and server side to support several webs sharing a single DB. I wrote the integration to the hexcode-based binary BTS-DA terminal interface and the transaction management code interfacing the DB in Java. Some JSP pages and parts of the authentication - and session management functionality as well. We also wrote a servlet that handled a set of custom tags years before such functionality were standardized in J2EE.
• LänsFörsäkringar bank. An Internet bank application based on J2EE.
  I participated in doing the system design, configuring the web server and the Java Web application, built parts of the GUI using HTML, JSP and Java Servlets and helped with performance tuning of the JVM. I also did support work and helped in the hand-over to the support organization at LF.
• Telia Näras Intranet web. A clustered web solution for knowledge management based on a BroadVision platform using client-side and server- side Javascript and C++.
  I participated in system design and graphical design, wrote parts of the personalized menu- and other customized functionality that were not supported by the platform. A lot of the funtionality required alterations of the platform code, so when we were finished the platform was no longer forward-compatible and couldn't be upgraded. I also learned a lot about customized DB schemas and how to set up a search engine.
• Mina Sidor På Arbetet.
  I did a NSAPI plugin for authentication and session management programming in C against a LDAP user directory.
• PPM. An application server (developed by Promotor and written in Java) were used by different self-service channels (e.g. web and telephone dial-tone) to mediate funds transactions to trade systems.
  My only contribution in this magnificently complex system of systems was to ensure thread safety in the application server, but it was a great learning experience since it required understanding of the involved systems integrations.
• Telephony portal for Stocholms Stad.
  I've been involved in two versions of the telephony management interface between Stockholms Stad and Telia, but the one I helped build while employed by Telia Promotor was based on Microsoft ASP and SQL Server. The portal offered Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality to several other support systems within Telia and a personalized view based on working role and ability to arrange portlets. I participated in system design, handled technical project management, wrote the SSO-functionality and some of the portlets.

Non-WWW-technology

I built a NT-Service-based translation server between a call-center solution (CallGuide) and a telephony recording system. I used Visual C++ to program the service, TAPI to route calls, and MFC for the Windows GUI where the user could start, stop, and configure the service.
I installed a minimal Solaris on an old Sun Netra i to run a Kerberos server for authentication and nothing else. I never got around to do peering with a MS Active Directory or the domain at KTH but managed to authenticate a client and get tickets from another machine.

Managerial and business experiences

As a computer software consultant I were often contracted to evaluate the technical foundation of different businessplans on the aspects of cost, performance, timeplans and general doability. I think my reports and comments were appreciated because such work items kept dropping in at the most inconvenient times during the other development projects.
For some small projects (< 10 developers) I did technical project management besides the development work. This included meeting with customers and the project board, keeping track of system requirements and releases, bugs and their fixes, ordering equipment and licenses, updating system documentation and so forth.
Once I was contracted to reinforce the second-line support of a telephony service-based call center platform, but instead of just answering calls I introduced several improvements to the process and the working environment for the support staff. This included choosing an issue-tracking system, establishing a routine for communicating work-arounds for known errors to the first-line support, notifications to customers about known errors (e.g. in the data-networks or firewalls) with estimated repair time, checklists for diagnosing errors, and building a knowledge-base over sites, customers and the specifics of their systems. The total number of issues forwarded to the second line support went from 100 per day to 10 per day, and only a few issues per month demanded the attention of the developers. In a few months I had rendered myself superflous and could turn my efforts to other contracts.

Maintained by Tobias Öbrink