eInnsyn

Johan worked as a senior developer for Direktoratet for Forvaltning og Ikt, a Norwegian governmental agency. He was contracted to work within einnsyn.no, which is a website exposing documents from authorities to the general public. Before publicizing, documents were handled by a number of Java microservices that would enrich the data, analyze it and make the content searchable.

The back-end consisted of micro services chained though an ActiveMQ. Documents were saved to a graph database called Stardog, and retrieved using SPARQL. ElasticSearch was used to make documents searchable. All components in the system were dockerised. The data was made available to the general public and journalists through a web portal, available at einnsyn.no

The project was in a maintenance and issue fixing phase when Johan joined, so his tasks were mainly to tweak, bug fix and perform various infrastructural improvements. That meant a lot of exposure to a vast array of technologies, and apart from coding, Johan worked on and improved robustness of the application security, logging flow, server configuration, docker setup, the graph database, fields to expose through ElasticSearch and code quality analysis.

The project and the teams efforts were well received and praised. Seeing as how access to documents from public agencies is a vital cornerstone in a democracy, the team was entrusted a high degree of freedom and could chose technologies freely. This resulted in a sophisticated technology stack, well suited to solve the task at hand.

The team was distributed across four different locations, so Johan got first hand experience of the challenges and opportunities brought by remote work. Apart from strengthening the team, improving code, tests and processes, Johan helped solidifying the underlying technologies.

The eInnsyn website: