About Myself ...

I studied physics at Imperial College in London, being a student from 1975 - 1978 (the best years ever, with the best music). After this I spent nearly two years as an electronics R&D engineer at EMI working on the Hubble Space Telescope's Faint Object Camera, which I just learned in fact stayed in service from 1990 till 2002 - much longer than the original design life. The work at EMI provided an introduction to the complexities and challenges of product development - the working in teams.

Following electronics I then spent around 10 years at Noble Denton mostly providing IT support for engineering analyses in the Offshore Industry. I was lucky enough to visit many of the structures we analysed - in particular during highly complex and critical installation or transportation procedures. I also spent nearly two years of the time in Brazil (1987 - 1988) doing similar work - much of it very much "hands-on" as seen below.

Further pictures from Brazil in 1987 [1] [2]

This experience has strongly influenced my thoughts on software engineering. I remember an esteemed colleague quoting "Steel is forgiving" (making reference to its mechanical properties). This gives a clue to the significant difference of the disciplines: ... Software is not forgiving. Software is brittle ... No amount of heat treatment or massaging will ever change this. Years later after the move to Germany I studied again, this time computer science in Berlin. My prime areas of interest were distributed systems, security and fault-tolerance.

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