Earlier noteworthy work

Charity Commission

System administration

Industry: Government Started: Jan 1991 Completed: Jan 1993

The Charity Commission is the UK government agency with responsibility for regulating charities in England and Wales.

Between 1991 and 1993, Frank Wales worked with them, helping to manage their computer networks and support their development team. He also helped to train their staff in Unix administration, and wrote tools and systems to help them do this more effectively.

As a senior Unix system administrator on the [off-site] Commission's computer management team, Frank was responsible for the day-to-day operation of all of the Charity Commission's production and development systems, a mixture of HP, Sun, Data General and other systems.

Duties and responsibilities

Frank's duties at the Commission included:

Planning, supervising and performing systems upgrades and maintenance without loss of service to users
Setting policy on matters such as security and account administration
Helping with contract staff recruitment and permanent staff training
Providing detailed consultancy on all aspects of HP-UX and SunOS software development and systems management.

Projects completed

Projects Frank completed for the commission included:

Developing centrally-managed software to run across all Unix platforms to perform automatic file system maintenance.
Designing, and supervising the development of, a network-based job scheduling system with command line, script and menu-driven user interfaces (which allegedly was still in use long after Frank's assignment at the Commission ended)
Writing a package for tracing Sybase OpenDB activity so developers could see what their 4GL tools were doing behind the scenes.
Re-writing a software release system to allow multi-server operation.
Writing back-end components for a PC-based front-end menu system allowing access to both PC and UNIX-based applications.

Strategy report

Near the end of his assignment, and at the invitation of senior management, he wrote and presented a report on long-term development and IT strategy. [end of entry]

HP-41 Emulator for HP-48

Technical consultancy

6 of 10
earlier work

Client Information System

Software development