Summit Code Works (aka Clayton InterGalactic)
Founded in October 2018
Role: Founder, Technical Leader, Investor.
Summit Code Works has operated as an incubator and idea generator since around 2014, getting more formal and organized in 2018 as Clayton InterGalactic. The group has delved into various technical topics over the years including working with VSchool graduates to implement some of the ideas. Projects have explored many ideas ranging from health monitoring to set top boxes to packet radio.
This has led to the current focus on highly private and secure unified communications. By leveraging auto provisioning innovations, Summit deploys ephemeral instances on Linode, Digital Ocean, AWS, and Azure, utilizing open source WebRTC solutions.
Imagine if you will, for only a few dollars, you can spin up an on demand video chat with file sharing and be confident that all traces would be gone at the end of the call. The intent is to provide a Tails OS like experience for video calls.
Previous Projects
The SkyBox Initiative
SkyBoxes allowed customers to subscribe via Square and get a VM in a few minutes. The VM provided Jitsi and other tools for WebRTC, VOIP, VPN, and file sharing. The product was in market from 2021 - 2023. At its peak, the VMs were running almost 200 meetings per week. The initiative was breakeven but was shut down in 2024 to allow Summit to focus on other work and considering that Jitsi has fallen behind Zoom and Teams by a wide margin. We felt that we needed to re-group and ensure that we are providing high quality services.
The project used Digital Ocean and Linode for provisioning, along with some early integrations with AWS and Azure. All UI was built in React running on Debian VMs. SkyBoxes were based on Debian with React UI served by Nginx. The internal database was MongoDB. Internal processes were based on Typescript running in NodeJS. The auto provisioning system was based on NodeJS / NestJS and Spring Boot Kotlin.
Project THELMA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtPBF7VHM4I&t=1s
Indiegogo: https://igg.me/at/ThelmaTech/x
THELMA intended to help people with chronic conditions by identifying trends and triggers that aggravate or alleviate symptoms. THELMA would:
- Remind you to check-in.
- Provide 1-Step Check-in capability.
- Allow expanded check-ins to document additional information such as stress level, changes to medications, and other potential factors that you agree to report on.
- Gather information (in the background - no manual entry) that may correlate to flares (aggravated symptoms) including weather and exercise data.
- Provide reports and charts with actionable data about your individual trends and triggers.
- Pool together anonymous data to determine larger trends and triggers that can be used by the healthcare industry.
I acted as architect for the project and produced the above document in 2017. The UI was produced by a team of volunteers and a couple of data scientists helped craft the backend data store in MongoDB. We typically used MongoDB for this type of work as it was amenable to prototypes. This is a good example of my design style.
DRC Regional Internet and Broadcast Design
https://www.facebook.com/CTYCTV/
A friend is part of a regional cable network in Phoenix AZ and had an opportunity to create a similar network in Kinshasa DRC. As there was already a point of care network deployed, we proposed that the POCT network could be leveraged for expanded services. Under a tight schedule (2 days!) I agreed to produce a very rough proposal which my friend could present to his contacts. I am under the impression that it was well received, but the DRC government was in turmoil and the project never came to fruition.
While the proposal has likely not aged well, this is an example of a document that I produced in about 48 hours. We have provided other services and consulting to CTYCTV over the years in the areas of content streaming, digital broadcast and theoretical network deployments.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_3.0
Current Projects Underway
SkyBox “Burner Chat” Project
After the shut down of the SkyBox Initiative, customers still want private communications, maybe even more so. Some use cases are “person on the street” reporting or online interviews where users want a Tails OS like experience with WebRTC, VOIP, or VPN. At the end of your call, all VMs involved are destroyed or you can just reboot if installed locally.
Like Tails OS, this project can be run anywhere on a ARM system up to cloud deployments. Leveraging the previous SkyBox work and other in home device work, we intend to deliver a solution that allows users to provision on their own hardware, on ProxMox or VMware, or in the cloud on Digital Ocean or Linode.
See also: Tails - How Tails works
Regional Secure Networking Project
Investigation of packet radio and other long distance, out-of-band types of communication. For users who still have local SkyBoxes, there is interest in establishing secure network links that are viable in the scenario of a prolonged Internet down event.
The project is researching packet radio but also LoRaWAN, Zigbee Pro, and other options. In rural areas, there are many abandoned towers. This project is also investigating application of compressed HTML or delivery of a much smaller web or a cached web across low bandwidth WAN. In the event of a CME, would such a network survive, or could it be sequestered and brought up on demand? How can such low bandwidth networks be useful in emergencies? This is what we aim to find out.