Category Archives: life

You Might Not Know…

…that Mike and I have been working on a secret project.

Some time last year a friend gave me a really good piece of advice. I don’t even remember what it was about – it was something totally minor. Useful at the time, but not something that particularly sticks in your memory. What did stick in my memory was the realisation that everyone has a pile of these little unexpected ways of doing things which plenty of people could use, yet most of them go unshared. This seems like a shame.

So, Mike and I set out to fix that. After a fair bit of work and a lot more procrastination, we give you You Might Not Know: A site for sharing those tips and tricks for life that you might otherwise not have.

I’m pretty pleased with how it’s gone so far. There’s still plenty left to do, but I find what’s there remarkably pleasant and easy to use, in no small part due to Mike being way better at user experience and design than I am.

So, do go check it out. If you’ve got something to share, great! Even if not, have a browse. Maybe you’ll learn something useful.

It’s all the same, really

Daniel Lemire wrote a post recently comparing one of Paul Graham’s essays on startups with the process of doing research.

It reminded me of a book I read recently, and an observation I made on it. The book was 101 things I learned in architecture school, and the observation was that half the advice applied just as well to software development as it did to architecture. I find this is often true: At the general level, good advice is very portable.

Here are some excerpts:

61. Less is more

Minimalism is not something that’s hard to find in software design (or at least software design as we want it to be instead of the endless feeping creaturism that it often turns out as). Particularly epitomized by the Unix philosophy of “Do one thing, and do it well”.

62. Less is a bore

On the other hand, there’s a reason we’re not all still living in the command line…

32. The most effective, most creative problem solvers engage in a process of meta-thinking, or “thinking about the thinking.”

Good advice anywhere, but particularly so in software development where there’s so much capability for abstraction.

81. Properly gaining control of the design process tends to feel like one is losing control of the design process

There’s a good chunk of explanatory text in the book about this one, which I’m not going to reproduce here. In short, this is about not becoming prematurely wedded to ideas and embracing the uncertainty needed for finding the right solution.

17. The more specific a design idea is, the greater its appeal is likely to be

Tools for solving everyone’s problems tend to be tools for solving no one’s problem.

90. Roll your drawings for transport or storage with the image side facing out

Ok. Maybe not this one…

A story, and an oft overlooked point

I’m going to tell you a story. It’s not an argument, it’s certainly not a statistic, it’s just a thing that happened.

About two and a half years ago, right before Christmas, my father fell out of a tree, into a river, and broke his spine.

My father is fine now. Were it not for a few visible pieces of metal in his back (which he’ll happily show off to you) and the fact that he went from being an inch taller than me to an inch shorter than me (which he’ll vehemently contest every time you mention) you’d never be able to tell it happened. But were it not for every single thing going right from that point and the incredible care he received over the subsequent weeks, he would be dead or paralysed.

I could tell you that the NHS saved my father’s life. It would be true, and I owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude for it, but it would also be somewhat missing the point.

I got back from a family reunion in the states about a week and a half ago. One of the themes of this reunion could be quite legitimately summed as “Hurray! None of us are dead yet!”. We’ve had more than our fair share of near fatal medical experiences on both sides of the pond, and everyone has come through ok. America and Britain both have amazing doctors.

This is probably the point at which you expect me to give a sob story about bankruptcy resulting from one of these medical conditions in the states. Fortunately not. As far as I know (certainly I’ve not heard anything to the contrary), everyone over there was suitably covered.

Perhaps then I should tell you that if my father were over there he would be bankrupted?

Actually, again, no. My father has private health insurance.

Yes, really. His employer provides it. It’s a very American setup.

You see, we may have this big scary seeming socialist monster of the NHS, but it’s not like we don’t have private healthcare too. It’s not even very expensive – I think I could probably get private care for about £100/month, without any employer subsidy, if I wanted it. I used to be covered by my father’s insurance when I was younger. It was very convenient for fast tracking things that would have had a longer wait on the NHS, and I generally received good care on it (I’d describe it as about as good as the NHS care I received but slightly more personalised), but I don’t think I needed to use it more than a handful of times.

So, why isn’t this a story about the great private healthcare my dad got in the UK? Simple: When my mother told the hospital that they had private health insurance, they shut the idea down flat. If he’d gone to a private hospital here, they wouldn’t have known what to do with him. For top end critical care in the UK, you use the NHS. It has the best emergency services, it has the best facilities, it has the best doctors. If you need medical care and you need it right now, you go to the NHS.

How to start the week

Ah, Monday. A new start! Full of fresh opportunity, and excitement about what the week to come will bring.

This Monday, we have set the SNAFU dial on David’s life to 11. Let’s see how long it takes him to notice…

First, some context. My flat contains its own boiler. A little combination electric/gas thing. Somewhat flaky, but it provides me with an unlimited supply of hot water on demand and is therefore my friend. On Thursday night I came home to discover that my friend was dead and bleeding all over the carpet. After a quick placement of a widget to catch the water, some rapid consultation with the landlord’s answering machine, email address and emergency backup number I turned the water in my flat off.

The next morning an engineer came in and performed the autopsy. He pronounced that there was no hope and that the leak had completely knackered the electrics. This was an ex boiler. Arrangements were made for the boiler to be replaced on Monday, and my parents got the lovely surprise of their son popping up for a weekend visit to their hot water supply. I returned Sunday night, got ready for the boiler maintenance on Monday.

The start of the day was pretty chaotic. A lot more stuff than I’d realised had to be moved to enabled boiler installation. That’s ok. It was doable. My friend Michael had kindly agreed to house sit my flat while the maintenance people were here, as I had to go to my contracting job at Wordtracker for noon. Unfortunately Michael overslept, not arriving at my flat till noon. Never mind. It’s only a fifteen minute trip, and arriving at 12:15 isn’t the end of the world, but as a result I’m a little flustered when I leave. I call Wordtracker to let them know I’ll be late, but no one picks up.

En route I realise I’ve forgotten the key code for the gate there. It’s not the first time. I think I remember it, but I might have a permutation, or one digit wrong, or something. Hopefully it won’t be a problem.

I arrive at the wordtracker offices. As I approach the gate, I see that there’s a large crowd of people in suits outside it, having some sort of event. I think it’s a bit weird but mostly ignore it and try to enter.

As feared, the code doesn’t work, and the gate declares in a loud American voice “The code you have entered is invalid”. I imagine more than see the dirty looks I’m getting from the besuited people, but I’m sure they were there. I try one or two times, each time denied by the electronic American. I give wordtracker another call, no response. At this point I begin to suspect I have the wrong number for them. I try the code some more.

So here I am, standing there like a prat typing in numbers into the gate and getting admonished by an American machine.

When a hearse pulls up behind me

Not really wanting to interrupt what it now a funeral procession with electronic equivalents of “You shall not pass!” I beat a hasty retreat and attempt to find out the code through means other than brute force. So I check their website for contact details. On the amazingly shitty and probably ludicrously expensive net access on my phone (I am not yet among those blessed with a smartphone). I find a contact number, different from the one I have, call it, and get through to their customer support answering machine. Great.

“Ok”, I think, “I have an email with the gate code. All I need to do is check that email”, and so begins the ordeal of trying to read gmail on aforementioned useless mobile phone. I’m about 90% of the way through the login process I hear “Oh, hello” as I am passed by one of the wordtracker people going to lunch. Where they inform me that the code for the little gate is broken and I need to use a different code which opens both it and the large gate. They’re very nicely apologetic for not having let me know. No harm done.

So I sneak through the funeral (which is now looking a lot less jolly than it was pre-hearse), enter the code (which again results in loud electronic Americanisms) and get into wordtracker. At last.

To find that the person I’m supposed to be working with isn’t there, and the one person who is there doesn’t know if he’s coming in.

Sigh. :-)

Somehow I manage to avoid cracking up, leave my number for Marcus to get in touch with me if he arrives, and head out through the funeral and back home.

The rest of the story is a much happier one. About half an hour later I get a call from Marcus letting me know that he’s there – unavoidable transit delays and he didn’t have my number – and I can come in whenever I want. I do so, and we proceed to in fact have a very productive day. Further, on my return home I am blessed with a working boiler. Here’s hoping it stays that way, and the rest of the week follows on from today’s evening rather than its morning.

Crowding the trampoline

As most of you probably know by now, even though I don’t talk about them that much, I work for a company called Trampoline Systems. We’re a startup doing some interesting tech things. That’s not what this post is about.

We’re seeking series B funding at the moment, but it’s a difficult time to be doing it through the normal VC route, so now we’re trying something new: Crowdfunding. Rather than getting a few people to give us lots of money, let’s get lots of people to give us a little money. Alistair knows more about it than me, so I’ll refer you to him if you want to know the details.

There are a bunch of legal difficulties with this in terms of who the FSA will allow us to solicit funding from. In particular I’d be surprised if even 10% of people reading this were on the list. So, this isn’t a “Give us money” request. To be honest, even if it weren’t for the resgulations it probably wouldn’t have been – other people in the company know more about the financial side of things and can say it better than I can.

What’s most interesting to me about the crowd funding isn’t actually the financial aspects. I mean, obviously ensuring the survival of the company is a good thing, but the crowd funding is interesting in a way that merely receiving a big chunk o’ VC funding wouldn’t have been (not that it would have been unwelcome!).

What’s interesting is the additional flexibility it buys. I’m big on the subject of open source and open information (I’m not a GNU style fanatic – I’m absolutely fine with closed source too. I believe in closing as much source as you need to and opening as much source as you can). There’s been a movement amongst the dev team (particularly me and Craig, our CTO) to see what we can extract from SONAR in the way of useful open source tools. Our term extraction code for example (which takes a blob of text and gives you useful fragments of text from it which make sense in isolation) is ripe for open sourcing. Unfortunately we’ve held off on it because it sounds like a much bigger chunk of our IP than it actually is, and we need to be super careful about how things look to our funders. This is understandable from their point of view, but somewhat disheartening from mine.

With crowd funding our hope (or at least my hope. This is all still under discussion) is that the larger group will be much more amenable to a policy of openness than the smaller. In many ways it’s much more in keeping with the style of the thing, and with less invested per person there’s less of a strong financial incentive to be risk averse and more of a reason to trust us with these decisions.

So, from my point of view, I’m quite looking forward to seeing what the future brings and, with any luck, it will include a few shiny new toys for you to play with.