Working Life Blog

Evolution through adaptability.

Riccardo Casula – Senior Software Developer

I joined Aridhia during the pandemic in 2022 as a Software Developer mostly focused on Python. Given the whole world situation, the onboarding was very smooth, and I felt very welcome despite having to work on a separate project and remotely. Every company was still learning how to adapt, and Aridhia had an already established remote onboarding process.

Currently, my role at Aridhia as a Senior Software Developer involves performing maintenance and developing new features for the DRE tools such as Jupyter Notebook, RStudio and R console. In October 2023 we joined the PHEMS consortium, which aims to provide a platform to federate data analysis among paediatric hospitals across Europe. As part of it, I take care of developing the service to support secure and reliable federation, with data staying secure in its environment. It will be open source in the near future, so stay tuned for that. My day is constantly switching between different tech stacks, pipelines, and platforms. I do like having different streams of work that allow me to take a break when software gets “stubborn” and lets me get a second look from a different perspective. Thanks to my academic background in Bioinformatics, I got used to switching focus from a computer science perspective to a biology one.

I am part of the Analytics Tooling team which handles the built-in tools in the DRE, is responsible for the infrastructure powering the Shiny apps, and provides the analytics modules in R. Our main objective is to ensure all these components (sometimes) talk to each other and have a consistent behaviour, so that users can use all our tools interchangeably according to what they prefer.

One of the things from my job that I really like is how much things evolve and the need to adapt existing technologies to new concepts or create completely new components to give end users the best experience. Having said that, it is not always an easy path and can be riddled with frustrations, but the result is always very rewarding. One great example is the PHEMS project where the service had to be built from scratch and I had the freedom of choosing the technology stack I preferred. It has been 8 months of development and the first demo and beta versions have been very promising. This service must satisfy a need that is growing more and more every day with no clear leader in the space. This means that I can get sort of a “creative licence” when it comes to coordinating different components.

Aridhia does value employee wellbeing and invests in our professional path. Among the things I do really enjoy here is the fact that we get every other Friday off, and we do work fully remotely with occasional in-person meetings (which are nice to give a strong boost in planning and team building). Aridhia does provide us with a generous budget for personal/professional training or certifications, and we are encouraged to use it as it benefits everyone. With a strong push on Machine Learning from different users we will need to adapt our platform to accommodate the need, and even the PHEMS project has a requirement for it. So, my training budget will be used for improving my knowledge of it.

Last but not least, knowing that our work ultimately contributes to different types of medical and clinical research, gives us a strong feeling of satisfaction and makes us proud of the job we do.