Junior (Trainee) Programmer
Tangram was a Financial systems provider, with a package, as I recall, named "Willow", operating from Sandown, South Africa. Long after my contract ended, the company changed it's name to Bynx, and is still in operation today, providing Fleet Management Services, headquartered in Warwickshire, UK.
I worked under a temporary, part-time contract, after my usual daily technikon studies from early/mid 1992 until late 1993.
I was hired on because of my aptitude for learning development languages (I taught myself how to code in C and C++ during my final year of high school) which impressed the CEO enough to hire me, and my first set of duties was to take "Pro-C" code, parsed through a pre-parser (on a Unix platform), and after the pre-parser had converted the embedded Oracle PL/SQL into something resembling C-code execution statements, I had to rewrite portions of the code into a modular set of reusable functions. This meant that I had to read through "spaghetti" code, recognise the code-patterns, and write reusable functions for optimised maintenance operations into the future - this saved the company many hours and a lot of money in pre-processing time, recompiling time, and the related testing.
Because we were still in the era of dot-matrix impact printers, with smaller CRT monitors with text displays catering to 80 columns and 25 rows, and later 50 rows, reviewing the generated wide-format printouts (132 columns, with many pages of text), I was tasked with creating a dynamic screen-viewer for the operator that would be able to "pan" over a digital representation of the report for review (prior to printout) - this saved the company's clients tens of thousands of Rands in related printing costs.
I also learned to work with Oracle Forms (version 4) for (as I recall) pseudo-graphic (text-based) user interfaces and connected database connectivity.