UL Alumni is delighted to introduce Cian O’Maidin, Founder and CEO of NearForm, a company embedded in the open source world and responsible for creating the COVID-19 app now available across 9 jurisdictions to 55 million people.
Cian is in conversation with alumna Dr Norah Power, his former lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS) at the University of Limerick. Listen in as they discuss how COVID Green was developed and open sourced, the company’s pioneering early work investing in Node.js and how he enjoys flying the flag for UL. Cian also reveals his “dirty secret”!
Cian O’Maidin is Founder and CEO of NearForm, where he leads a vocational team of world class developers and open source contributors across 21 countries. Specialising in globally accelerated solution and platform delivery for clients including Condé Nast, Ikea, ADP and WalMart, NearForm are the biggest contributor to the Node.js project with the team contributing 30% of all the code to the latest release, and their contributions to the module eco-system representing about 8% of all the modules downloaded globally each month. NearForm is a conduit between the web open source eco-system and the enterprise. We are the biggest contributor to the Node.js project.
Under Cian’s leadership, NearForm has expanded to become a leader in developing contact tracing apps for national and state governments across Europe and the US. COVID Green is the underlying source code of the Irish COVID Tracker app which was developed by NearForm and open sourced by the Irish Government and HSE. The NearForm Covid-19 app is now live across 9 jurisdictions, including Ireland, Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, Scotland, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with more US states launching soon.
Cian has been heavily involved in the open source community - having created NodeDublin in 2012 and NodeConf EU in 2013. This led to his role as curator of NodeConf.eu, which Cian holds to this day.
Dr Norah Power Grad Dip Computing/MBS is an alumna and former Lecturer of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS) at the University of Limerick.
Norah retired from UL in 2018 after 38 years of service. She had lectured in Computer Systems and more recently, in Health Informatics. She supervised PhD research in a variety of areas including software development skills, software engineering and health informatics.
She is now a Docent (volunteer) at the Hunt Museum in Limerick, where she enjoys the privilege of introducing visitors from all over the world to its diverse collection of art and antiquities.
