Sue Burgess: CV
March 2003 - December 2004

Analyst/Programmer at Oxford Brookes University

• Main duties:
  Working on course and student administration systems, using Oracle SQL, PL/SQL, Oracle Web Toolkit, Oracle Forms 6i, Unix (Solaris) and C. I also did some work on the personnel system, which involved use of LDAP. My work included:
  
  • Writing a set of packaged PL/SQL procedures and functions to handle the fact that multiple administrative calendars, rather than just one, would be in use from September 2004 when the university started to divide the academic year for most of its courses into semesters, while retaining old-style terms for other courses, e.g. in Education. It was my own idea to create a PL/SQL package to deal with this increased level of administrative complexity, rather than repeating the underlying queries throughout the system.
  • Major amendments to the web-based software used by students for online entry of their module choices and for viewing their timetable and academic results. This software is written in PL/SQL using the Oracle Web Toolkit package, and needed amending to take account both of multiple administrative calendars and major changes to academic regulations from September 2004. Significant improvements in performance were also essential, and I achieved these to a great extent by using local arrays within PL/SQL procedures, rather than constantly going to disk to access relatively unchanging calendar data.
  • Far-reaching amendments to a large, complicated and initially very unreadable C program known as “Check Options”, which runs in server mode, validating the module selections made online by students and checking that these options add up to a valid degree. This program was much feared by most of the programmers in the team (someone had even added the comment “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” as the first line). As well as successfully implementing the academic regulation changes which came into effect in September 2004, I also made the program far more maintainable by adding explanatory comments and replacing the original vast mass of hard-coded numbers with descriptive names.
  • Amendments, including addition of new pages, to a number of Oracle forms used, e.g., for maintaining external examiner details, date/time and location of examinations, and subsets within teaching groups.
  • Loading of personnel data via text files into an LDAP directory for use with diary applications; some work on authentication and transfer of encrypted password data between systems.
• Salary: £24,000
• Reason for leaving: Ill-health after a bereavement and a miscarriage. I AM NOW FULLY RECOVERED.

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