Meet Stew, one of our Developers

Stew works on our Spinnaker platform and he is an essential part of how Spiral helps to save lives with our randomised, adaptable clinical trial software that has helped patients with COVID-19, and more.

Stew’s been a Developer for more than 30 years, but he says that working with us at Spiral has been some of the most meaningful.

“You feel like you’re really contributing, and helping people. You’re not just turning up to a job to make money, you’re actually making an impact. It’s doing something that’s going to save hundreds of lives over time – if not thousands.”

Being a Developer, at its core, is about being a problem solver – and not everyone may realise that it’s a creative job. There’s usually more than one way to solve something, and some solutions are better than others. This is a challenge Stew enjoys – questioning how to make something work best for the busy nurse or the study manager at the hospital, for example,

“They’re all overloaded, so how do we make this information the easiest for them to capture? How do we make the most effective user interface?” is how Stew puts it.

Stew describes himself as a ‘gopher’ – ’go for this, go for that’. We think that’s great, but Stew is so much more than that, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that we at Spiral couldn’t do it without him. Spinnaker, after all, is more than just a clinical trial platform. Its strength lies in its ability to randomise, to adapt, and to run multiple ‘mini trials’, called ‘domains’, all at once, such as within the REMAP-CAP trial that studied COVID-19. Stew is essential to making this extremely complex task possible.

We asked Stew what his goal is, working with us, and he told us that he wants Spinnaker to be the first-choice product for novel trials – trials that are not boilerplate, but completely unique to what the requirements are, depending on what’s being investigated. We reckon that’s pretty spot-on, and we’re looking forward to working towards our common goal.