Nev Delap - Software Engineer

The project was a large military communications system. It included a large number of distributed CORBA servers in C++, workflow GUIs and maintenance GUIs in C#, running on a combination of Windows XP, Windows NT, and Linux to control communications hardware for analog and digital HF communications.

My responsibility was in writing some of the primary CORBA servers in a traffic stack providing the end to end HF communications between ground, air, and sea based units. The project is classified and so can't be described in any specific detail.

The implementation was in Visual C++ using the ACE/TAO CORBA implementation. ACE/TAO is an open source implementation of CORBA 2.3 designed for high reliability applications such as aviation and military systems.

Aside from C++/CORBA development my main contributions were the championing of CppUnit style testing, Martin Fowler style Refactoring, and the use of Design By Contract and Built In Test as techniques for ensuring high testability, maintainability, and robustness of the software. This was extremely successful.

I developed a very, very easy to use CppUnit style testing framework providing for checking server availability, concurrency testing, memory leak detection, simplified test writing, results report generation, writing of results to database, generating reports and so forth.

Mantara's flagship product was the Elvin Router high performance publish-subscribe messaging server, now the basis for their flagship high performance stock trading systems. The Elvin router is capable of servicing thousands of clients passing tens of thousands of messages per second. It implements the Elvin network protocol identified by the elvin:// url schema. The protocol is implemented in language bindings for Java, Mobile Java, Python, and C/C++. My primary responsibility was the implementation of the .NET binding for the elvin protocol, supplied as an SDK for download from the Mantara website, including assemblies, reference documentation, and programmer's guide. Supporting this internal to Mantara I wrote the build and test infrastructure for nightly authomated build and test on Windows (.NET and Mono), Windows CE (Compact Framework), and Linux and Mac OS/X (Mono) using NUnit, and Clover for Visual Studio.NET.

I developed the Digital Video Road system for use by road engineers. Included digitising software, incorporating support for analog video tapes encoded with road data, a viewer supporting display and measuring tools for road/bridge assets and features, an editor for creating and using collections of road videos and data, and an automation interface for integration into Main Roads database road management systems. On Silicon Graphics IRIX 6.2 and Windows clients, when suitable hardware became available I later rewrote it run purely on Windows to reduce user, support, and hardware costs, and updated/improved it to enhance the software as well as provide support for using video on the local area network. It included support to play JPEG stills as video to support data from a new pavement condition data collection vehicle purchased by Main Roads and the proprietry data formats generate by that system. The application was used by Main Roads Districts, Local Government, and engineering contractors and consultants to reduce costs associated with travel to remote locations.

The software was integrated into other Main Roads systems including GIS applications and road condition database tools. It used an ATL COM component for automation in both C++ and Visual Basic applications. The integration was provided to display road condition data in graphs, tables, etc, while viewing the relevant sections of road both playing as video, and displayed on GIS map applications, and more.

I also provided consultancy on object techniques, particularly in training the VB programmers and mentoring them in their learning and application of UML, and the techniques of object oriented design (where they could be applied to the VB of the day), and the use of Rational Rose for analysis and design.

Regular duties included providing secure temporary networks for use by staff doing up to $400,000,000 per year contracts tender processes, and administering and providing support to the network used by the ~100 regular staff. I took over this contract temporarily, replacing another person who went on their honeymoon, and additionally - because it desperately needed, I rebuilt their servers to provide disk and server redundancy, put in place a backup regime - previously non-existent, did a security review for the Minister and in my spare moments developed and intranet site for documentation management.

LAN Systems was responsible for the infrastructure development of the Australian Taxation Office logical LAN, spanning 26 offices around the country. A Coax Ethernet LAN with, at the time, approximately 300 NT 4.0 Servers and 17,000 Windows 95 clients.

I was senior programmer responsible for C/C++ development to provide functionality on top of that available in the standard products used on the LAN for both system management and to meet business requirements. I was involved in all development, from design through programming, testing, documentation, installation, and maintenance. Development was using Microsoft Visual C/C++, Borland C++, and Glockenspeil C++ (OS/2), in DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT and OS/2 LAN Manager environments writing multi-threaded, multi-session Windows to Unix socketed applications, automated upgrades, rolling out of LAN infrastructure, management of roaming users, policies and profiles, before Windows servers had such support, Microsoft Systems Management Server customization, installation services (before products like InstallShield), across the, for that time, extremely large network infrastructure.

I wrote and taught courses in C/C++, HTML, TCP/IP, Data Communications, Windows Server administration, and Web design (Tax Intranet), in Canberra and interstate. User through LAN Administrator level trainer, courseware developer & training consultant. Consultant to ATO staff on Network, PC, Systems and Applications training.