Proprietary code I’ve been paid to work on:
Landscape, by Canonical
- Source
- Documentation
- https://ubuntu.com/landscape
- Description
- Canonical's infrastructure / systems management tool for Ubuntu Linux. deployments. Landscape was my day-job between 2011 and 2017.
Timaeus, by Cmed Technology (now part of Axial Group)
- Source
- Documentation
- https://www.aixialgroup.com
- Description
Timaeus was a suite of software appliances for Electronic Data Capture and Electronic Data Management in Clincal trials.
Timaeus was originally developed by a start-up called ThirdPhase, spun out of the Oxford University incubator under the leadership of Dr. Timothy Corbett-Clark and Dr. Mark Holt. ThirdPhase eventually merged with the Clinical Trial Management company, Cmed, and formed the Cmed Technology arm of the Cmed Group, with Timaeus as it’s primary product.
Timaeus was delivered as a series of hardware appliances, running a custom linux distribution that booted directly into the application. Each appliance was built, automatically from a clinical trial configuration and featured a custom hierarchical, Copy-On-Write database that replicated subsets of the database on a peer-to-peer basis. Communication channels were managed automatically by the appliances, utilising multiple modalities (Ethernet, WiFi, dial-up modem, GSM, GPRS, BGAN Satellite).
The design of the Timaeus system was a radical departure from traditional clinical data management systems (like Oracle Clincal) or even the “cutting edge” electronic data capture systems of the day, which tended to be delivered as web applications.
Timaeus enabled complex trial designs that other systems couldn’t achieve, and its peer-to-peer architecture allowed operation in geolocations that other systems couldn’t reliably operate in, such as sub-Saharan Africa - as demonstrated in a pilot program that resulted in Timaeus winning the 2008 GCPJ Award for “Best Technological Development in Clinical Trials”.
Cmed was the first start-up I ever worked for, and Timaeus is, to this day, the most interesting, and technologically challenging product I’ve ever had the honour to work on. I’m eternally grateful to Dr. Tim Corbett-Clark for taking the plunge and hiring me.