Who is MARSI?
Massachusetts Addiction Recovery Software, Inc. (MARSI) was created by Mark Jones, a Boston area software engineer with 9 years of full time software engineering experience. My experience is primarily in C++, but also has included large amounts of Java and MATLAB.
This project has been a great project to increase my technical knowledge as it has allowed me to practice Python, and JavaScript (Node.js and browser based d3 and jQuery). It has also required me to learn Android more fully and to learn iOS and Swift with no prior experience with either. It has also allowed me to get familiar with Google Cloud Platform.
As fun as it has been technically, it has been even more rewarding for the lives it may save as explained below.
LinkedIn: markTheMiner
My Motivation
After seeing the death toll from opioids rise to 4-6 people per day in Massachusetts and knowing that nearly the same amount die from alcohol too daily in MA (88k/year in the US), I decided to join the Heroin is Killing My Town Facebook group (as well as several others). I saw that they posted the open detox beds daily but that the numbers changed frequently throughout the day. I realized I could create a mobile app for people to be able to look up the current open beds more easily.
The app has taken several months to develop; the Android version and the backend services in the cloud were developed between September and December 2016 at around a full time weekly commitment, and the iOS app was developed in January and February of 2017.