Benjamin Hos

As a technical analyst, I work in a small team at the University of Waikato looking after MyWaikato. MyWaikato is a website and database used by hundreds of staff and thousands of students in their daily life at the University.

I help support students and staff when they have a problem with MyWaikato. This may involve running an advanced process or query, or fixing data issues. For more serious issues, I am involved in all parts of the development process, from developing a fix, peer reviewing the change, and testing the change before release into our production environment. I have also been involved in several larger projects to bring new features to the users of MyWaikato.

Development of MyWaikato is done in Tribal SITS:Vision, a proprietary system with a unique coding language. I went into this role with no SITS experience, and the only documentation that exists is the documentation provided by Tribal, or that we create as a team. This proved an exciting challenge, as I learnt as I worked, quickly gaining knowledge that couldn't be simply found by searching for the answer on the internet or asking Chat-GPT.

One such project was adding new functionality to MyWaikato to allow students to submit an application to have their course grade reviewed. Previously, this was done using by the student submitting a word document with their details.

• I had to make sure that the data used in determining the students eligibility was coming from the correct location in our database, and that the data my program saved at the end was being stored correctly
• I regularly sought feedback from stakeholders, answering their questions and considering their feedback in my solution

Another project was testing a big project that would allow university staff to submit proposals for new papers, and submit altered proposals for existing papers to be changed.

• When I found a problem, I provided detailed bug reports, including screenshots and screen recordings of the issues
• I collaborated well with my team, other teams in the university, and contractors who were doing the development work
• I assisted with the training of university staff in the new functionality, and gathered their feedback to provide the contractors with questions and feedback from the users

I developed an iOS app for nurses and healthcare workers to manage availability, see shifts, and
sign timesheets.

• Prior to this project, I had no experience with iOS devices or the Swift Programming language. I taught myself how to programme in Swift, and helped my coworkers with issues, as I was the only developer who knew how to code in Swift
• I was also given responsibility for the Android app. I made sure that the features provided were the same across both apps, and that the documentation for both was kept up to date

I developed software to read important details off an invoice and identify clients and suppliers to
automate invoice upload to Xero.

• My software greatly improved the processing speed of our invoices. Over 10,000 invoices were processed, with a success rate over 90%
• I developed this program in python, and assisted my coworkers in their own python code development and training

I developed a program to identify medical symptoms in patient notes and predict possible long
term health conditions.

• When I left, this program was still in development. I made sure that all the code was documented, and that instructions had been written to help the user operate the program effectively
• It had already been used successfully, identifying patients who were eligible for High Use Health Cards, saving time for the staff who would have had to manually search patient records over the span of a year to determine if they were eligible

I was part of a long term data analytics and auditing project for a large multinational company

• I've developed tools in Power BI, Excel and Python for Auditing 10 years worth of data. I
  have written SQL queries to pull specific data from two large databases containing records for
  thousands of users.
• I identified significant issues with data affecting a wide range of business operations. With a
  detail-oriented approach I was able to go above and beyond to identify more issues that
  were previously unknown. In weekly meetings I presented these problems and possible
  solutions to senior staff and to upper management. At one point, my findings were taken to (at the time) Queen's Counsel.