Australian Defence Force

Seven months as principal engineer on an ADF training platform. Baseline cleared. The brief was tracking demonstration, not completion. That distinction shaped almost every other decision.

Standards over custom

The data layer speaks public standards from IMS Global: CASS for competency modelling, xAPI for the analytics. Picking standards meant the platform spoke a public language from day one rather than a bespoke vocabulary that would need a translation layer at every integration point.

The internals of how the standards are applied stay private.

What it does

Find a person by competency, or a competency by person. Elasticsearch under search, the graph layer in front. Relevance had to absorb the framework's depth, where what mattered for someone's progression wasn't always what matched the keyword.

xAPI gives you the demonstration, not just completion. For Defence, completion was never the question. The question was whether the person could do the thing, and whether you could prove it later to someone who wasn't in the room.

Identity

Keycloak federated to Azure AD so personnel signed in with the credentials they already had. The configuration is the part I can't talk about. Standard Keycloak shape on the public side; the contract takes over from there.

Outcome

Owned the build end to end. Real-database integration tests from day one. Stayed inside the lines of what adjacent teams owned.

Seven months. Handed over running.