YouTube is good for something then

The nearest I get to my past academic life these days is watching science programs and podcasts (and finding all the nerdy physics jokes in the Big Band Theory funny. If this happens you know you should leave the world of physics!). So I was catching up on my astronomy podcasts last week when  came across this one.

Slightly disconcerting for me because this is what I use to do. Specifically it's part of the same project I was working on before I left to come back to the real world. Bit of a wrench deciding not to be part of building the world’s largest telescope but I found out recently that my old job disappeared after I  left and more critical people than me have lost their jobs so if I’d have stayed I’d probably not have a job anyway.

Do I miss it. Well parts of it. Jetting off to remote mountain tops and playing with big telescopes definitely. Constant insane deadlines, no money or job security, not as much.

Well at least I still have the pretty pictures I took.

A Bit of Coding (or the price of success)

When I was younger I use to falter myself that I was good at coding software. I suppose I was reasonably good but probably nothing special. The point was that I rather liked doing it and it’s what got me into this business in the first place.

Last week I came down with some bug that was going round and I ended up sitting at home with not a lot to do so I decided to sit and do some fairly mindless coding which had been hanging around at work of quite a while.

So how did I get into software? Picture this: The early 80’s in Cambridge; Sinclair Research at the height of it’s power; Computer Mags catering to every nerdish tendency; Computer Clubs at school to keep you out of the rain. I mean forget the Airfix lunchtime model club what was geek boy here suppose to do ;-)

To be honest I was rather late to the 80s computer craze. Quite a few of my friends already had computers of various types before I’d even heard there was such a thing as a mouse with VD (apologies to French and Saunders productions). It wasn’t until 1982, a full year after the seminal ZX81 was released, that I became the slightest bit interested and then that was by accident.

In our third year (I suppose they’d call it year 9 these days) the boys in the year got to do one term of woodwork, one term of metal work and one term of home economics. (Yes it was a long time ago; yes it probably doesn’t happen any more; yes it was probably sexist; but those were the cards we were dealt unfortunately). I was terrible at all three to be honest; I couldn’t cut wood in anything like a straight line; I put far to much sugar in my Victoria Sponge; and I spent most of my metalwork lessons doing dangerous things with the brazing torch.

Anyway it was in metalwork that the ‘accident’ happened. My project in metalwork was to make a metal box. Nothing fancy just a metal box with a hinged lid that would shut. Mine ended up looking like someone had battered it with a hammer for half an hour and then painted it red (probably a fair description of it’s manufacture to be honest) but an off hand comment got me involved with computers for the first time.

I really can’t remember the bizarre conversation that lead up to this remark but I was talking to RichardN (only guy in my second year science class to get a higher mark than me but that’s another story of trauma for another time) and the phrase came out “So are you building that for a RAM pack?” Now at that point I had absolutely no idea what a RAM pack was. (For the uninitiated it’s a small device that plugged in the back of a personal computer that gave it extra RAM [or course at this point I had no idea what RAM was either]).

Now at this point in the conversation I could have a) pleaded ignorance and gotten laughed at; b) said it was for something else; or c) blagged my way through. Well I chose option ‘c’ so at some point I had to find out what on earth I’d made stuff up about and that’s were it all started I guess.

A ZX81 with a whole 1k of RAM followed. Learnt how to write programs in BASIC and then assembler. Sort of inevitable that I'd end up writing embedded code for a living really.

But this brings me back to the beginning of my ramble down memory lane. I haven't written code for quite some time. It's and unfortunate fact of life that the higher up the food chain you get the less you get to do things that you actually like doing (or possibly are good at). Well at least I got to walk down memory lane and do something (possibly) useful for a change.

Startup Mentality

I was down the pub yesterday lunchtime having a cheeky pint and a tai curry when the conversation turned to startup companies. More specifically the kinds of people who are willing to take the risk and the potential rewards you can expect.

We all more or less agreed that all the people we knew who'd done this deserved the rewards they got considering the risks they took. We also agreed that none of us had the right mentality to do this and were quite happy with the job security of coming into a company after this stage.

Afterwards I got to thinking: in academic terms wasn't this exactly what I did all those years ago? I mean I sold up and spent the money getting a foothold on an academic career. Given the time I spent doing it I did well and made a bit of a splash before I decided to stop.

I've just never thought of myself as this sort of risk taker before (or while I was doing it for that matter) but then I suppose I didn't see it as a risk since when I started out on, what I shall henceforth term "The hair brained scheme", I had little more ambition than pass PhD and sail off into the sunset in a small yacht. Yes, really, that was it! (I will get round to this story in time)

I suppose it helps if you have few ties when you're contemplating your hair brained scheme but it's interesting to contemplate that I might have the Cambridge startup mentality after all.

Once upon a time...

...I had a nice respectable job, house in the home counties, all the gold I could eat (apologies to Monty Python). Then for various reasons which I will ramble on about at a later date, I decided to sell up, move north and become an academic. All great fun while it lasted.

When I headed up north I was single which colours your outlook on life slightly. You're willing to accept the hit in terms of salary, the long hours and the lack of separation between work and home life but situations change. I'm remarried now with two wonderfully children (henceforth known as trouble one and trouble two) so I'm more worried about good schools than getting papers published.

Don't get me wrong, the family stuck it out past the point of reason but in the end job security won out (thank-you bankers and Coalition government). Now this presented us with a bit of a problem: I'm an embedded software engineer which is a bit of a specialized profession so we'd probably have to relocate. Weighing things up we decided being near one set of grandparents would be a plus so back down to Cambridge we went (plus if you know anything about Cambridge you’ll know it’s full of high-tech boffins starting companies to do this and that).

Did I mention I grew up in Cambridge? I'm that rare phenomenon, a local comprehensive kid who works in the high-tech industry in Cambridge. I'm not saying Cambridgeshire doesn't have some very good schools, after all we've decided to put our kids into them, it's just you don't meet a lot of locals in my line of work.

So what’s this all about then? Well I’ve been back just over a year and I’m still adjusting. It’s an odd experience fitting back into a life that you basically haven’t lived for 15 years. I keep bumping into people who I worked with years ago (Cambridge is basically a very small place). Things have changed but not that much.

But mostly I suspect it’s going to be about kids and schools.

We’ll see.