Peter Debus

I helped the Ministry of Social Development improve their customers’ digital experience through optimised search and insight across 18 internal and public facing web & mobile channels. I was the technical lead and architect from RFI and solution selection through to design and implementation of the new insight engine. My involvement included back end and front end development in Java, JavaScript and Perl.

A sample of my hands-on approach to enterprise software consulting and… Show more

I helped the Ministry of Social Development improve their customers’ digital experience through optimised search and insight across 18 internal and public facing web & mobile channels. I was the technical lead and architect from RFI and solution selection through to design and implementation of the new insight engine. My involvement included back end and front end development in Java, JavaScript and Perl.

A sample of my hands-on approach to enterprise software consulting and implementation include:
• Collaborating with MSD’s communications teams, solution architects, systems and network engineers to understand our shared goals, objectives and constraints of all stakeholders.
• Giving greater autonomy to communications teams to manage the customer experience.
• Led the design of the hybrid on-premise and cloud architecture to support legacy constraints whilst delivering on MSD's cloud ambition to grow digital-ready maturity. This included advising on F5 BigIP network design to ensure a performant hybrid architecture through network rules and caching.
• Developed the integration of OpenText TeamSite DXP with Funnelback Insight to improve the author and end user experiences. The included optimising metadata schemas, develop publishing workflows and unstructured data processing. This enabled FunnelBack’s out-of-the-box faceted navigation search filters and other features.
• Improving the customer experience and empowering the communications team through FunnelBack’s Content Auditor, Marketing Dashboard, Concierge Auto-Completion, Accessibility WCAG auditor, search engine optimisation and instant update of search collection indexes at publish time.
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I helped Qantas’ Online Sales & Marketing team deliver their customer experience and revenue goals by enabling them to directly engage with their frequent flyers and new customers on qantas.com. I delivered a scalable TeamSite Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to publish marketing campaigns, e-commerce flight and travel products, customer loyalty and other content.

Using the DXP Qantas rapidly grew online revenue, reduced costs and improved customer experience (CX). This project was a… Show more

I helped Qantas’ Online Sales & Marketing team deliver their customer experience and revenue goals by enabling them to directly engage with their frequent flyers and new customers on qantas.com. I delivered a scalable TeamSite Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to publish marketing campaigns, e-commerce flight and travel products, customer loyalty and other content.

Using the DXP Qantas rapidly grew online revenue, reduced costs and improved customer experience (CX). This project was a core element in Qantas’ strategic goals to compete and grow in a rapidly changing airline industry with the rise of low-cost carriers and direct e-commerce travel transactions.

In close collaboration with Qantas’ Online Sales and Marketing team, system engineers and developers I led, designed and architected the TeamSite Digital Experience Platform (DXP) implementation. The platform integrated TeamSite with Qantas’ Weblogic Java environment to enable dynamic interactive content experiences necessary for Qantas’ customer experience and e-commerce ambitions. My hands-on consulting and developer role included:
• Close collaboration with Online Sales and Marketing to understand their goals, objectives and what success looks like.
• Design and architect the DXP implementation.
• Design the content versioning structure critical for record keeping and audit trail.
• Integrate TeamSite with Weblogic.
• Design and develop Weblogic page templates.
• Design and develop metadata schemas for search optimisation.
• Design and develop workflows to ensure critical approval processes were followed while adding productivity enablers such as scheduled publish times for managing campaigns.
• Publish digital artefacts and content to the clustered load balanced web delivery environment. Show less

High Level Overview

This project replaced UNE’s Dept. of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science teaching computing capability. The old system comprised of one Netware server, 2 teaching labs running an old version of Unix (40 workstations) and 1 teaching lab running Windows (20 workstations). The old system was complex to maintain, out of date and the 2 Unix and 1 Windows lab configuration was not flexible to support growing and diverse teaching demands.

The budget was a… Show more

High Level Overview

This project replaced UNE’s Dept. of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science teaching computing capability. The old system comprised of one Netware server, 2 teaching labs running an old version of Unix (40 workstations) and 1 teaching lab running Windows (20 workstations). The old system was complex to maintain, out of date and the 2 Unix and 1 Windows lab configuration was not flexible to support growing and diverse teaching demands.

The budget was a typical University budget, tiny, so I had to use open-source software throughout the solution build. The open-source packages were totally new to me. And my boss trusted me with this! Back then I felt sick, today I’m so grateful to have had a boss and mentor that instilled such confidence and courage in his apprentice, I’m very privileged.

Computer science students love to play and break things, and so they should. But this presents some challenges for a managed lab environment. My solution to support Linux and Windows with student-proof clean boot partitions using nothing but open-source took some creative thinking, system’s engineering, some software development and a pinch of firmware engineering.

Given this project comprised a collection of open-source packages and my custom software development I was extremely pleased to discover my solution stood the test of time lasting some 12+ years. My solution survived despite new open-source projects delivering more packaged solutions in this space, apparently they lacked the flexibility and some features of my bespoke solution, I felt a little chuffed.

The Accomplishments project below goes over technical detail with plenty of geek speak so if that doesn’t float your boat look away now and jump to the Interests section so no one gets hurt. Show less

Technical Detail, overview above.

A Linux-Samba server replaced Netware, providing a server supporting both Unix/Linux and Windows workstations.

I contributed C code to the Samba open-source project.

The workstations in all 3 labs were replaced with network boot PCs loading a Linux ramdisk boot image.

Below is the rapid fire bullet list of key technical elements of the solution build:

• Purpose built Linux kernel, configured to remove all but the essential… Show more

Technical Detail, overview above.

A Linux-Samba server replaced Netware, providing a server supporting both Unix/Linux and Windows workstations.

I contributed C code to the Samba open-source project.

The workstations in all 3 labs were replaced with network boot PCs loading a Linux ramdisk boot image.

Below is the rapid fire bullet list of key technical elements of the solution build:

• Purpose built Linux kernel, configured to remove all but the essential to be the Linux ramdisk network boot image.
• Using the open-source Netboot package combined with a DOS style boot loader driver I created a custom boot ROM image. Burnt this image onto a blank ROM chip, plugged it into a network interface card (NIC) and network booted the PC into a Linux ramdisk configuration. So far diskless network booting. Once validated did same for 60 PCs.
• The Linux-Samba server provided network authentication, authorisation, file-systems, printers and learning packages for the Linux and Windows workstations.
• The workstation boot process used some local disk to save state during reboots. Partitioned and reformatted on demand if needed.
• The booted Linux ramdisk image presented the user with a boot menu
o Linux X-Terminal – boot Linux in X-Terminal mode using local disk for swap memory and temp files.
o Linux Workstation - boot Linux in workstation mode using local disk for swap memory and temp files.
o Windows – boot from local Windows partition.
o Refresh Windows partition – this copied a fresh Windows image from a hidden local disk partition to the Windows boot partition. The Windows image could also be refreshed from the Linux-Samba server if the local hidden image was missing or failed checksum tests.
• Based on a sysadmin console setting one could force a refresh of an entire lab, forcing the local Windows and hidden partitions to be refreshed from the server. Of course someone had to run around and power cycle every PC to refresh the entire lab.

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