Diana Andra Bârsan
Principal Software Developer
Software developer with 17+ years of experience across the full software lifecycle, currently principal engineer at Medic and top contributor to the Community Health Toolkit (CHT) — an open-source digital health platform supporting community health workers across seven countries. Designed and evolved the CHT's offline-first replication architecture across three generations (2018–2026). Deep expertise in performance, scalability, and distributed data. My work is public: contribution history, designs, and technical writing are auditable at
github.com/medic/cht-core. Fully remote since 2009.
Experience
Principal Software Developer — Medic (formerly Medic Mobile) · Remote
Jan 2022 – present
- Led the migration from a monolithic architecture to Docker-based services with blue-green deployments (2022), enabling distributed, horizontally scaled systems while still maintaining one-click upgrades
- Rearchitected the platform's core data path: rewrote initial and continuous replication off PouchDB internals (2023) and migrated replication queries to Nouveau indexes (2025), reducing system load by 50% and cutting replication time by 60%, measured in production
- Leading a year-long UX overhaul of the CHWs' primary workflow (the tasks page): instrumented the page with interaction tracking, shipped task filtering (Feb 2026) and GPS capture for households (Aug 2026), currently designing offline-capable task prioritization and in-app maps showing task locations (2026)
- Built the platform's performance measurement infrastructure: automated EC2 benchmarking suite (2023), database endpoint benchmarks (2026), and frontend performance benchmarks (2026) — now gating releases
- Delivered measured performance wins: purged-docs cache (2023), task recalculation at scale (2024), end-to-end data archiving pipeline which unlocks system scalability where stale data encumbered day-to-day operations (2026)
- Strengthened security and observability: introduced an auditing database (2025) and monitoring endpoints with replication-failure tracking (2026)
- Defined the long-term platform strategy; led several community squads, mentored 10 community contributors
Software Developer — Medic Mobile · Remote
Jan 2018 – Dec 2021
- Designed and delivered the first rewrite of the CHT's replication engine (2018), the foundation of the platform's offline-first sync — allowed systems to scale the number of concurrently connected users without stability issues
- Designed doc-level authorization (2018), the platform's data-access security model
- Built server-side purging (2019), allowing local devices to maintain good performance with historical data accumulation
- Led the Angular 2 → 10 framework migration (2021) across the full web client
- Delivered integrations including RapidPro messaging and token-based login (2020–21)
- Acted as first responder for production incidents and live deployments
Full Stack Web Developer — Novisites VOF · Remote
Aug 2012 – Aug 2017
Designed, built, and tested custom web applications and Prestashop webshops; created and integrated APIs; monitored uptime and security and optimized database performance.
Full Stack Web Developer — Web One Division / Eclipse Concept · Romania
Mar 2010 – Jul 2012
Developed Magento webshops, CMS, and custom business applications; integrated third-party systems including payment processors.
Freelance Web Developer
Jun 2009 – May 2010
Independent development of small-business websites and custom web applications.
Intern — Produweb · Belgium
Nov 2008 – May 2009
Open Source & Community
- #1 contributor to cht-core since joining in 2018; #4 all-time on a codebase dating to 2013 (143 contributors) — full history public at github.com/dianabarsan
- Rewrote the technical and architecture documentation for the CHT (docs.communityhealthtoolkit.org)
- Technical support to CHT implementers on the community forum — 1,100+ posts since 2019
- Upstream open-source contributions, including PouchDB, CouchDB, WebdriverIO
- Author of CHT release announcements and technical posts published at medic.org
Technical Skills
Expert (daily use): JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, CouchDB, Docker, Kubernetes, Git, Linux, CI/CD pipelines
Proficient: Python, Java, Bash, PostgreSQL, Angular, Express, REST APIs, Nginx, HAProxy, Grafana, Prometheus, AWS, Android SDK
Familiar: Go, React, Redis, MongoDB, Couchbase
Languages
English (proficient) · French (intermediate) · Spanish (beginner) · Dutch (beginner)
Education
BSc, Computer Science — West University of Timișoara, Romania
2004 – 2008