Werner Strydom

Learn more about my career, and hobbies.

Experience

Scratch

Period: Jan 2020 thru now
Title: Software Engineer, DevOps

Started as a software engineer, focussing on deployments, and developer productivity, but started to wear many hats due to COVID:

automate building infrastructure in AWS
upgrade and migrate Jenkins, Artifactory, Sourcegraph and GitHub Enterprise
improved security, through training,
improved compliance (completed a successful SOC 2 Type 2 audit!)
improved overall governance
improved business processes - employee onboarding, offboarding governance
automate, automate, automate

Change Healthcare/RelayHealth/McKesson

Period: Oct 2012 thru Jan 2021
Title: Software Engineer

Started working at RelayHealth in 2012 which was a subsidary of McKesson Technologies (MTS), which in turn was part of McKesson.
Around 2016, McKesson divested McKesson (MTS) and merged with Emdeon to form a new company Change Healthcare, with McKesson being the largest stakeholder.

I joined RelayHealth as a software architect, but gravidtated towards an area that was poorly served, which is that position that bridges the gap between operations and product teams – or as some call it, DevOps.

Established CI/CD pipelines to formalize and automate the software release process to the fullest extent possible
Mentored and supported product teams, information security officers, cloud engineers, team leads, and system administrators in DevOps practices; identity management, access control, infrastructure automation, secret management, Azure technologies, and governance.
Collaborated with executives, team leaders, and product owners to come up with and adjust approaches to migrate applications and systems from McKesson to Change Healthcare infrastructure.
Led initial efforts to rebrand the Data Platform from McKesson held brands to Change Healthcare brands; resulted in 95% of the release process being automated, including infrastructure provisioning, deployments and certificate management
Designed, implemented and then taught others to automate Azure infrastructure using C#
Designed, implemented, and supported CI/CD pipelines in TeamCity, storing artifacts in Artifactory
Established, maintained, patched, and supported TeamCity, Artifactory, Coverity, GitHub Enterprise, and other tools necessary for DevOps and scaling release engineering activities.
Designed, implemented, advocated and supported Akamai CDN. Eliminated maintenance windows required to refresh Patient Education content. Reduced deployments from days to minutes, improved application reliability and performance by almost ten-fold (due to proper caching).
Led some of the efforts to migrate a large code base from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.5
Worked with DBAs to to automating database schema migrations
Led the efforts to update a large legacy codebase to support the latest version of Surescripts

Workshare

Period: Sep 2002 thru Sept 2012
Title: Software Architect

Successfully delivered the beta of Workshare Online, a cloud solution that allows users to compare documents. The second version included a REST API and SOA architecture.

Compare website written in C#, ASP.NET MVC 3, CSS, JavaScript
MSMQ used to improve scalability and reliability
REST API secured using OAuth 2; Data at rest encrypted
Accounts website to register and authenticate users, manage settings
Deployed the solution to AWS (EC2, ELB, S3, SQS, RDS)
Develop PowerShell CmdLets to facilitate operations and deployment

Manage a team of 4 to deliver Protect Server 1.0, an on-premise solution that removes metadata from Microsoft Office documents when emails are sent externally.

Deliver a framework to discover and remove metadata
Windows SMTP Sink to process emails, written in C#
Store results in SQL Server database for auditing and reporting - Administration website written in C#, ASP.NET MVC, CSS, JavaScript

As part of a team, deliver Protect Network, an DLP appliance that monitors network traffic, process emails and audit any requests that violated policies.

Designed an SOA architecture and facilitated its implementation
Wrote Network Monitor in C and Win32 API that process HTTP and SMTP traffic
Developed WCF services to manage policies, software updates and settings
Administrator website written in ASP.NET, CSS, JavaScript

Successfully delivered the initial release of Compare Server, an on-premise server that allows other systems to compare two Microsoft Word documents.

WSE web service implemented in C#
Developed samples in C# and Java to facilitate quick adoption
Provide support to sales organization to reduce sales cycle
Implemented build processes and continuous integration

Developed Workshare Protect, a successful application consisting of a desktop application and Microsoft Office add-ins to remove metadata from documents.

Worked as part of an extreme Programming (XP) team
Desktop application written in MFC, C- - , XSLT, XML
Protect Client API developed in ATL, COM, C, C- -
Lotus Notes extension written in C/C- - and Lotus Notes API
Microsoft Office Add-Ins written in C/C- - , ATL, VBA