COVID-19 contact tracing on the BEAM

COVID-19 contact tracing on the BEAMTracing a pandemic's spread throughout society presents its unique challenges. This talk will cover the history of «Hygeia», an application on the BEAM, built from scratch for the sole purpose of empowering health workers in managing the pandemic and its impact on the lives of the affected.

We will cover the story of how technologies such as Phoenix, LiveView, ecto, gen_smtp, Surface, and Docker/Kubernetes empowered us to develop a viable application in a highly dynamic field and how we discovered and overcame many pitfalls along the way.

OBJECTIVES:

The talk aims to give listeners 

• a broad idea of the business and/or technical challenges contact tracing in general poses
• a possible solution to said challenges with technologies in the BEAM ecosystem
• an idea of potential pitfalls from using said technologies for this purpose and how to overcome them
• what we learned from working with technology in such a highly dynamic field such as the COVID-19 pandemic

AUDIENCE

• Listeners who are interested in how to make and argue technical decisions in a field like public health administration
• Listeners who are interested in leveraging the BEAM ecosystem for building interactive, real-time web applications
• People who already use the aforementioned technologies and want to know more about potential problems with them and how to overcome them