Seb Bacon
CTO, Bennett Institute at University of Oxford
Stroud, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
SeniorSeb Bacon is a seasoned technology leader and CTO at the Bennett Institute, with 16 years’ experience turning complex clinical and organizational data into actionable, privacy-preserving products. He leads product design and delivery for OpenSAFELY — a high-profile platform trusted to analyse GP records for 58 million patients — and has scaled the institute through tenfold growth while keeping engineering close to the technical coalface. Comfortable both in strategic partnerships and hands-on backend work, he guides cross-functional teams of coders, data scientists, clinicians and academics to deliver reproducible research and interactive open-source tools. His open-source contributions to mature civic-data projects like CKAN and Alaveteli reflect a focus on backend reliability, testing and data ingestion at scale. He combines academic rigor from an Oxford environment with pragmatic engineering and a track record of influencing national-level health decision making. A detail often overlooked: he balances high-stakes privacy engineering with pragmatic product rollout and NHS adoption, not just research outputs.
16 years of coding experience
Github Skills (15)
email-parser10
e-mail10
mail-parser10
regular-expression10
ckan10
email-parsing10
api10
sqlalchemy10
python10
back-end-development10
testing10
databases8
database8
postgresql8
catalog5
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
mysociety/alaveteli
Nov 2010 - Jul 2012
Provide a Freedom of Information request system for your jurisdiction
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:906 commits in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Seb primarily focused on maintaining and extending back-end functionality, as demonstrated by their work on improving regular expressions within the `IncomingMessage` model to filter and process email data. They also worked on ensuring the correct handling of attachment files by addressing file conversions and file size display. Further, the user contributed to infrastructure changes related to the test environment, ensuring tests run in the expected context.
freedom-of-informationalavetelirequestjurisdictionaccess-to-information
ckan/ckan
Dec 2010 - Apr 2011
CKAN is an open-source DMS (data management system) for powering data hubs and data portals. CKAN makes it easy to publish, share and use data. It powers catalog.data.gov, open.canada.ca/data, data.humdata.org among many other sites.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:68 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Seb's commits primarily focus on modifying and testing the backend functionality of the CKAN data management system. The code changes involve adjustments to API tests, model initialization, and database interactions. These modifications suggest a focus on improving the system's reliability and functionality by enhancing tests and fixing potential issues related to the backend's core components. The user also made changes related to the harvesting functionality and the database migration.
portalspythondatadata-catalogdbpedia
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