 Hi everybody, my name is Kino Madin and I'm here to talk today about breaking transmission chains with JavaScript. So it's lovely to be here. First I'd like to give you a bit of my own background. So I'm 42 years old, I'm a computer scientist. I live in a small town called Tremor in County Waterford, which is in the southeast of Ireland. I live with my wife Amidia and my three kids and you know I've done I've done some interesting things in my career. You know primarily you know found it near form about nine years ago. I know it can't be you and some other things. So a little bit about near form started a company about nine years ago. We've been pretty successful. We've got 200 people now operating out of about 20 countries. Everybody works remotely at our company and what we do is we design, we build and we operate web, mobile and cloud platforms at scale primarily for public companies and tech companies. We're really really big advocates for web open source and we've been major contributors to the Node.js project for a number of years now. Both Nodecore itself and the module ecosystem and also we've been contributors to the React ecosystem more recently. So enough about me. So today I want to tell you the story of how we built the most widely used exposure notification app in the world last year. It's a pretty amazing adventure. Probably one of the best adventures I've had in my career. So before I jump into it I'd like to give you a bit of my own story. So at the end of February of January last year I went on a business trip to London, a three-day business trip and on the way there just before I arrived at my hotel having gone through Heathrow and Dublin airport on the way. It started to feel like I had some kind of thing stuck in my throat. I started to feel a little bit unwell but I met the team. We went out, had dinner, got back to the hotel and the next couple of days I kind of had to drag myself around the place a little bit. I felt like I had some kind of sickness but it wasn't too bad but really had to look after my energy levels, get through things and just about made it through the final the third day on my trip and then I got on a plane, came back to Ireland and got home to my young family and as much as I tried to be upbeat and full of energy coming home I really didn't feel that well. So that weekend I started to get a fever. I developed a really bad cough and it was a cough which was bad to the point of almost vomiting from the kind of coughing that I was doing and so eventually on Sunday I went to go and see the doctor and the night before I'd been in bed kind of looking at some of this stuff. They were talking about a pandemic coming out of China and all these things happening in the news so I was kind of thinking in the back of my head I couldn't have like this COVID thing that they're talking about. I went to doctor and the doctor examined me and he said you have a chest infection and you have a flu which was kind of an unusual combination of things. So he gave me some antibiotics and other things that didn't do any good for me at all. I went home and I got into bed and I was really really sick. Had a high fever, I had shortness of breath and wheezed for the first time my entire life and just felt really really crummy. Interesting thing is my wife also got sick that week and she went to the doctor and the doctor said to her you have a chest infection and a flu and give her more antibiotics and things that didn't do very much for her. She wasn't too bad with it but I was I was pretty sick so I really struggled over the next three or four weeks to try and get back to work. Found that I wasn't like I go back to work for a couple of days then they'd end up back in bed again. So it really took me like about five weeks to get over it. The funny thing is that you know during the first week that I spent in bed I spent more time reading about this like this new virus that they were talking about and maybe there's going to be a pandemic and all that stuff and I said to my wife that there's a pandemic coming and she was like laughing at me saying like you know don't believe everything you see on the internet all that good stuff but like ultimately I was proven to be right and things got pretty scary in the world you know in February and March of last year. I guess I characterize how things were for me anyway I felt like for somebody that's really tried to take control of my life and I made things happen that this external event had happened and I felt just felt really powerless like there was nothing I could particularly do to to make a difference to what was going on in the world and everyone else I'm sure felt the same way. So they declared a pandemic eventually you know we watched the horror what was going on in Italy in March of last year and the Irish government then were going to lock down the country you know the shops ran out of toilet roll they ran out of flour everybody was really scared and in Ireland they cancelled the St Patrick's Day Parade for the first time which is pretty crazy like so anyway the weekend of after St Patrick's Day Parade I got a call from a man who works for the health service executive in Ireland asking if I could potentially help the health service executive to build an app to help to deal with the pandemic and and of course I was I wanted to do what I could do I called up some of the team here on a Sunday night they started like to gather requirements together and we started prototyping what an app would look like and and so we started to put it together and and we started building what what ended up becoming the COVID tracker app so so I guess the the things that I would say around building the COVID tracker that are important but would would be like that in terms of building the app there were some core principles that we discussed at the very beginning one was empowering people we felt that an app that just did exposure notifications and exposure notifications are when you're when you're in proximity to somebody else for a number of minutes typically six foot proximity for 15 minutes if one if the person you have the app the other person is the app the exchange Bluetooth key and one person gets infected and the other person gets told about it we felt that that just having that functionality within an app itself wouldn't be enough to keep people engaged and so we thought about how can we empower people so we put in like a check in daily check in function to the app a symptom tracker and then also some data on what's happening around infections in your local area we knew that the app needed to be privacy first and privacy protecting that was the most important thing because if people don't trust the technology they're not going to download it they're not going to install it so we made sure that everything within the app was optional it was really clearly labeled we knew transparency was going to be really really important around how the app was being built and what all the things in it meant and because because people in you know a lot of people don't trust technology and so the final thing then was that it would be easy to use that we cater from people who were you know from 15 to 85 years of age so we started working on this we built from that Sunday night 10 days later on Wednesday the first of April we had a working version of what is now the COVID tracker app it had a custom Bluetooth stack that we developed because there didn't exist at the time any official exposure notification API from Google and Apple and so a couple of weeks later Apple and Google announced they were releasing the exposure notification API for iOS and Android and and then a decision was made pretty quickly that we were going to like not use our homegrown Bluetooth stack and we're going to adopt this so we had to go and rebuild this thing we had to retest it and we did that during May and June off of the year we also had to do things like multi-language support we did like accelerated behavioral studies so we really looked at the language in the app you know things like you know when I download the app I'm protecting myself I'm protecting others like what are the best ways to describe things what are going to get people to use the app we worked with accessibility groups in advance of launch and then the big things the really big things were the people working for the health service executive in Ireland produced a data protection impact assessment which is a human readable document that described everything going on with the app all the data that was traveling around what the impact was and that was that was published three weeks before the launch of the app and also with that then we we also published the source code for the app three weeks before the launch and these are really important things so uh so you know the covert tracker app was born um there's a couple of screenshots here you have uh the login screen and the the the front page screen on the very left hand side here you get some uh information about the number of people that checked in today how many are feeling good how many have some symptoms what's happening nationally you can click into that uh and various other things and then there's some of the other pieces off um uh some other screens about the setup and registration of the app uh how many people have downloaded it and uh and what happens if you get a close contact and and so the app was launched we did a soft launch on the 6th of July um and uh within a day or so uh the app really really took off uh so we ended up with like over 20 million api calls per day uh on aws uh really really quickly um so when the app launched on eventually i think some of the tweets the people sent out were really nice uh you know here's someone talking about the data protection uh you know the impact uh protection infractive information is written in plain english uh people can opt in and opt out and it doesn't access your file camera etc it is really important stuff um also that the app was written in react native and typescript um and uh the code is available on github under mit license and that's really important to people who can uh i can see what's going on and i want to trust it so the minister for health in irland steven donnelly launched the app uh formally on july 7th um actually turns out was my birthday that day uh and uh and it was a huge success um so uh the plan had been that uh it was going to be a soft launch for the first week see how it goes and then there was going to be a big pure campaign and on july the 7th um irland really stood up that day uh and uh everybody got behind the app uh people are talking about it on the radio on television uh on social media and uh lots of celebrities different people got behind it and they were like we need to do this we and i think a lot of the work in the behavioral studies and the messaging was really important this is about protecting each other and standing up together to to beat covid and so um we ended up having more than a million people uh started using the app in the first 24 hours uh from launch um and it was it was a huge success um so scaling um so once we had launched the app and we were well we were getting close to launching the app a number of other governments started talking to us um because you know all the health departments talked to each other um and word was going around that we were doing something the right way um so we started really thinking at this stage about well how can we focus on rolling out this technology as quickly as possible like we really wanted to respond uh to the need that was happening out there in the shortest amount of time that we could uh you know making making the project open source uh was a really uh really important part um off uh off the approach um everyone can download it any government can download it use it for free um and uh you know um it just made a lot of sense to people um so in particular once the first government had actually built this thing and rolled it out and tested it then being able to access all the work and all all all the uh you know the the backing of all that work that had gone into it um you know made a lot of sense for somebody else that wanted to pick it up versus like build something from scratch um the other thing was that we really weren't in is to make money so uh the cost per system after the first one was about 25 percent of the original implementation so really we were just trying to customize uh the work that had already been done uh and get people up and running as quickly as possible and um and the other piece is that the you know each implementation like added to the strength of the overall open source project so um you know features that that are or things that uh one government and one jurisdiction might need uh will get committed to the project uh and go back into the master branch and then the other governments will get to access that and and get a benefit from it so it's a really good test case for open source um kind of proud moment for us uh you know in the middle of doing all this rollout was that uh we started getting some traction in Europe um with the the project and then uh we started getting uh some initiatives conversations going in the united states and and so it became important for us to put the the project into a neutral uh repository so we created this project with the HSE uh called a COVID green uh it's green for Ireland uh and it's also uh green for the map turning green again uh as as COVID disappears um so we put it into Linux foundation and um and from there then things really started to roll so uh we launched the app in Ireland uh in north of Ireland in Scotland uh in Gibraltar and then in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey uh and and Jersey uh in the uh part of the uh the Commonwealth and finally um New Zealand actually launched using the source code without without us needing to help them uh near the end of the year last year so the highlights of the project um um for me the the highlights of this project uh were like the the the nature of what we achieved in this in a short amount of time so you know we managed to do all this uh a team of no more than about 15 people working in your form uh managed to you know take the first call on the 22nd of March and uh by 26 weeks later we did our last deployment which was uh uh New Jersey uh so you know we got on it we solved the problem we worked really closely with government and um we created this open source project and then we did this rollout all over the place uh to many governments in a really short space of time and um it's a big uh big big career highlight for me and be proud of all the people in your form for managing to to make this happen um you know in Ireland we got about 40 percent of the adult population we're using the COVID tracker at this height um uh which is pretty impressive and uh the app itself uh saved lives uh significant number of lives and uh reduced a lot prevented a lot of people from getting sick um and the other thing is that Ireland and the north of Ireland uh so north of Ireland were a second rollout uh they were the first two countries at the first two uh health uh services in the world uh to interoperate and have like a common format um where people could use the app in the north of Ireland north of Ireland app and come down south and it would work uh perfectly well um in summary um I'd like to think that we're we're going to be much more well prepared for the next pandemic lots of learnings lots of uh lots of assets in place now um infrastructure like COVID green uh and things like this I really think that it's perfect it's a perfect uh use case for open source uh and and infrastructure like this should be in the public domain like you know problems that we have in one country that we have to address by and larger the same as the problems we have in other countries um and uh the open source approach uh itself has has done some really interesting things it's created a lot of new connections uh so you know the work we've done has managed to create a network between 10 10 different health health bodies from Ireland to Pennsylvania uh whereby uh over time we'd like to like make this into a bigger thing and we'd like to get more health health bodies talking to each other and innovating and sharing what they're learning sharing what they're creating and that can only be a good thing um so um yeah I hope you found this talk informative uh it's been a real pleasure to get to work on something like this uh I really like to thank uh everyone at near form later on in the conference a number of near formers are going to talk about uh that the actually the building of the technology the operating of the technology um you can hit me up on key and omadine on twitter and uh if you want information about covert green uh you can go to github.com uh slash covert green and check out the repository thank you very much