I worked for the Western Cape Government via QLC in 2020 to 2021.
I was asked to write their Annual Performance Planning (APP) System in Oracle Apex.
I was soon adding HTML, CSS, JavaScript, NodeJS, and other toolsets to help me solve problems, and showing long term Oracle Apex developers how to solve complex problems, via my wide reading and my personal paradigm of working without getting stuck. I also bought a number of Oracle Apex books and did some Udemy courses.
They had told me that they expected it to be a 3 year project, and I made the mistake of saying that I could do it in 18 months. I didn't understand how government works. In the first year of development, I added quite a bit to the specification, including adding a Permissions Management System that allowed an administrator to use the Western Cape Government's employee hiearachy in Emergency Services, for example, to grant permissions to the APP system.
After a year, I made a suggestion that they didn't like and I got fired. I think they used that as a pretext though, as I was working way too quickly for their liking. And the problem for me is that I wasn't being paid enough to work so fast, but I was having fun and so was working faster and faster. My mentor had told me when I got the government job to not make any suggestions outside my particular brief and this is where I failed. I didn't listen to him, as by then I had worked for WCG and QLC for 2 years and I thought that I had a great relationship with them.
I really enjoyed that development as I was given full control over a new Schema in Oracle, and I had control over creating tables, stored procedures, views, the Oracle Apex front end, everything. It was wonderful. Unfortanately I worked too quickly, and they got rid of me.
I subsequently discovered that they had tried to write this project over the previous 12 years and had already failed twice. I think they were expecting to fail again, or for the project to take multiple years. And I think they didn't realise that a single person, given the permissions and intellectual freedom he needed, could actually develop such a complex system in such a short time.
It is now 2026, 5 years after I left, and as far as I know, the much reduced system, still isn't complete.
If you're in government (or anywhere) and you have a project that is late, or that no one can complete, give me a call. You never know. Perhaps I can solve your problem without even coming on site.