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By Brennon Bortz - 20th September 2011
Two roads diverged in a wood…and I took the twisty, windy, curvy one--I'm sure glad I did, though. When I sat down to interview with Andrew Macfarlane and company at the Centre for Affective Solutions for Ambient Living Awareness (and I'm still the only employee to be able to say that ten times fast!) over two years ago, I was really excited about the prospect of all the mobile app development I would be able to do, were I to be offered the position of Software Researcher at CASALA. Within a matter of twenty-four hours, I'd received and accepted the offer, and began the process of sorting my permission to work in Ireland as a citizen of the United States. Once that process was complete, I jumped right into the deep end of what would be two years of intensive mobile development…or not. In reality, while I did do a fair bit of mobile development, my role at CASALA grew and changed over the last two years to include a great deal of other responsibilities in many other problem domains.
The primary mobile development I did lead was that of ALAN--the Assisted-Living Access Network. ALAN was built as an app to be deployed on a number of Viliv tablet devices in the homes at Great Northern Haven that reported information about the home, including current weather, the status of doors and windows throughout the house and current electricity usage. ALAN was featured on Ireland's national evening news, and is now regularly recognised around the country from this press coverage. Initial explorations into using televisions as feedback devices with GNH residents also took place in the beginnings of STEVE, the Senior Television Enhanced Viewing Experience. I also developed the prototype for the Daily Health Survey iPad app, which is currently being prepared for deployment to GNH.
A good deal of my time was also spent on the twists and curves, however. I spent many weeks designing and implementing the architecture of the CABIE database, which houses and indexes all of the data gathered from the thousands of sensors at GNH--currently more than 100,000,000 records. This process included building the system to ensure that these data are safely transported from the systems at GNH to our primary research systems at Dundalk Institute of Technology. Another of my responsibilities has been to implement and maintain our source code management system at CASALA (we use Git), as well as maintaining our development infrastructure. I've written a web app that checks in with our multiple production boxes to determine at any given moment the status of each system (including CPU loads, disk space usage and uptime). We have a separate system that I've built running redundantly on another box in a land far, far away (in a certain City by the Bay) that also keeps an eye on the health of our production systems.
In the middle of this (I already count at least a developer, sysadmin, and DBA in there…), I've done work around the second, "Reseacher" portion of my title. We've written a number of conference papers and journal articles covering the software developed at CASALA and the cutting-edge systems we're implementing at Great Northern Haven. After all of this, I'm sad to say that my tenure here has now come to a close. It's been a whirlwind of a couple years, and my closet is chock full of hats that I've worn at CASALA; I'm terribly glad the road has been so windy--I've learned an awful lot and gained a mountain of experience that would be hard to come by in any other one position. I'm excited to keep watching where my former teammates go. I know it's going to continue to be impressive!
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