Buba Bojang

The TIERS project caters to the management and processing of three programs viz; the Texas Public Assistance Program, which assists low-income people to meet basic needs such as food, shelter, and medical assistance; Food and Cash Benefits, which provides financial aid to individuals or groups who cannot support themselves and are funded by taxpayers that enable people to better cope with financial stress during rough periods; and the Medical Assistance Program, which helps lower-income individuals, the elderly, and those with disabilities with medical costs in a public insurance system.

These programs are jointly funded by the federal and state governments and administered by states. The most common medical assistance programs are Medicaid and Medicare. This integrated system consists of legacy Java applications, EJBs, Spring Boot web services, Angular front ends, and mobile apps. Some of the tools and technologies used are REST/RESTful APIs, Hibernate, Oracle, MySQL, Kotlin, Bash, Docker, Kubernetes, Git, Jira, and Jama.

I was the Java back-end engineer, utilizing domain-driven design in building new microservices and adding new features to existing ones, and created Oracle SQL migrations for batch job executions.

The GRA has two operational departments that are entirely independent, i.e., the Domestic Tax Department and Customs and Excise Duties Department. Each of these departments has its internal applications. Senior management saw the need for a real-time dashboard that collects and aggregates data from all these applications based on some given KPIs.

This involved building web services for each operational database using Java, Spring, Hibernate, PHP, Laravel, Vue.js, Node.js, MySQL, REST, and RESTful APIs, utilizing RabbitMQ as the messaging technology between the services and deployed on Azure cloud with Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS).

I streamlined senior management strategic decision-making by designing a GRA strategic dashboard that connects and generates data from operational databases and analyzes data using 139 operational and analytical KPIs.

The Customs Intelligence application is a system developed to record contraband seizures and keep track of the movements of drugs and known drug traffickers. This system is used mainly by customs officers in the field, especially at border posts, to record seizures and serves as an information exchange platform between border posts through push notifications.

This system was designed while leveraging domain-driven design and implemented as microservices, with services written using Java, Spring framework, PHP, Laravel, MySQL, MongoDB, Node.js, RabbitMQ, REST and RESTful APIs, Docker, and Kubernetes.

I improved intel investigations and seizure cases for intelligence and enforcement sections by creating a Customs Intelligence application for the Customs Risk Management Unit that provided analytics on contrabands seized based on types, concealment methods, and transportation modes.

The GRA HR Working Group had a difficult time tracking the competency level of every employee for every skill set required in relation to their job descriptions. I proposed a competency assessment system based on the GRA competency framework and dictionary, a document developed by GRA with the support of WCO-WACAM (West Africa Customs Administration Modernization). The system assesses each staff on competencies relevant to his/her job description. For each competency, the staff is gauged and given a proficiency level ranging from Level 1–awareness, Level 2–Application, Level 3–Experience, to Level 4–Expert. The system also identifies employees with expert-level competency in a skill as potential trainers to help train those that lack the required competency in that skill.

This helps HR to know the strength and weaknesses of every staff and help them in their capacity-building program. The HR Working Group successfully profiles every employee's competency levels for all the required skills in their job descriptions. It has begun training those who need to level their skills up by those employees the system identifies as trainers.

GRA HR Working Group needed a custom survey application in their HR awareness campaign that would generate comprehensive reports on staff awareness and understanding of HR roles, awareness of HR reforms, access to HR reform documentation, the satisfaction of HR services, and expectations of HR and the Administration department.

This system was designed and developed the PHP Laravel framework using the MVC architectural pattern with MySQL database. The HR Working Group successfully conducted the surveys and generated reports that helped them define the course of direction in their campaign.

We developed an integrated hospital management system for
government hospitals in The Gambia. It enables multiple hospitals to have accounts. Some of the modules included are consultation, appointment, lab services, pharmacy, billing, in-patient, and referral. This is a distributed system designed using domain-driven design and built as microservices with PHP Laravel framework, Java Spring framework, Vue.js, and jQuery, using RabbitMQ for inter-service communications and MongoDB and MySQL as the databases. It enabled the centralized maintenance of patient records and improved sharing of patient medical history and referrals between public hospitals in The Gambia.

The Kubejara College management system is a multi-tenant system built to meet college's and universities' academic and managerial demands. It has features that cover the day-to-day administration of a college, including online application, course management module, finances module, academic and transcripts module, HR module, asset management module, and payroll module.

This distributed system was designed using domain-driven design and implemented as microservices. The main languages used in building the services are Java, Spring Framework, PHP, Laravel, MySQL, Node.js for the back end, and Vue.js for the front end. This product is currently used by many colleges and universities in The Gambia.