Ten years of Codethink

Spring is here and it is the 10th anniversary celebration of Codethink.  Nobody could have orchestrated it this way but we also have GUADEC happening here in Manchester in a few months and it’s the 20th anniversary of GNOME.  All roads lead to Manchester in 2017!

The company is celebrating its anniversary in various ways: cool new green-on-black T-shirts, a 10 years mug for everyone, and perhaps more significantly a big sophisticated party with a complicated cake.

The party was fun with a lot of old faces some who had travelled quite far to be there. The company was and still is a mix of very interesting and weird people and although we spend most of our time in the same room studiously not talking to eachother we do know how to celebrate things sometimes!

It was odd in a way being at a corporate party with fancy food and a function band and 150 guests in an enourmous monastery given that back when I joined the entire Manchester staff could go for lunch together and all sit at the same table. The first company party I went to was in Paul Sherwood’s conservatory, in fact the first few of them were there. It’s a good sign for sure that the company has quadrupled (or more) in size in the ensuing 6 years.

In hindsight I was quite lucky to have a world class open source software house more or less on my doorstep. I spent a long time trying to avoid working in software (and trying to avoiding working at all), but I did do a Summer of Code project back in 2009 or 2010 mentored by Allison Lortie, who then worked for Codethink and noted that I lived about 5000 miles closer to her office than she did.It was an obvious choice to apply to there when I graduated from University and luckily it was just at a time when they were hiring so I didn’t have to spend too long living on 50p a week and eating shoes for dinner. It was very surreal for the first few months of working there as a world which I’d previously only been involved via a computer turned into a world of real people (plus lots of computers), in fact the whole first year was pretty surreal what with also adapting to Manchester life and discovering the how much craziness there is underneath the surface of the technology industry.

I had no idea what the company did beforehand, and even now the Codethink website doesn’t give too much away. I saw contributions to Free Software projects such as Tracker and dconf (and various other things that were happening 7 years ago) but I didn’t know what kind of business model came out of that activity. It turned out that neither did anyone else at that point; the company grew out of consulting work from Nokia, but the Elopcalypse had just happened and so on starting I got involved in all sorts of different things as we looked for work in different areas: everything from boot speed optimizations and hardware control, to compiler testing and bugfixing, build tools, various automated testing setups, and more build tools, to Python and Ruby webapps, data visualisations, OpenStack, systems administration, report writing and more. Just before Christmas 2011 I got offered to go work in Korea, the catch being that I had to go in 2 days time, and the following year I spent another memorable month there (again with about 2 days notice). I also had month long stints in Bulgaria, and Berlin although these were actually planned in advance, plus all sorts of conferences as the company started to sponsor attendance and a couple of days off for such things. Most importantly of course I got involved in rock climbing which is now pretty much my favourite thing.

Since a long time now it’s felt like the company has a solid business model and while the work we do is still all over different sectors I think I can sum it up as bridging the gap between the worlds of corporate software projects and open-source software projects.  We have some great customers who engage us to do work upstream on Free Software projects which is ideal,  but far from everything we work on is Free Software, and we also work in various fields that I’m pretty unexcited about such as automotive and finance. It’s very hard to make money though if you  spend all your time working on something that you then give away so it’s a necessary compromise in my eyes.

And even in entirely closed source projects having knowledge of all the great Free Software that is available gives us an advantage. There are borderline-unusable proprietary tools still being sold by major vendors to do things like version control, there are unreliable proprietary hardware drivers being sold for hardware that has a functional and better open source driver, there are countless projects using medieval kernels, obsolete operating systems and all sorts of other craziness.Working for a company that trusts its employees is also pretty important, I meet operating systems engineers there are working on Linux-based devices whose corporate IT departments force them to use Windows, so right they trust them to maintain the operating system used in millions of cars but they don’t trust them to maintain the operating system on their laptop.

One thing Codethink lacks still is a model for providing engineer time to help with ongoing maintainance and development of different free software projects. There have been attempts at doing so within the company and I acknowledge it’s very difficult because the drop in, drop out nature of a consultant engineer’s time isn’t compatible with the ongoing time commitment required to be a reliable maintainer. Plus good maintenance skills require years to develop and either require someone experienced with a lot of free time to teach them to you, or they require you to maintain a real world project which you mess up continually and learn every lesson the hard way. Of course open source work that comes out of customer projects is highly regarded and if you’re lucky enough to have unallocated time it can sometimes be used to work through the backlog of bug fixes and feature additions for different tools you use that one inevitably develops as a full time software engineer. Again, it amazes me how many companies manage to actively prevent their developers from pushing things upstream.

We have been maintaining Baserock for years now (and many people have learned lots of lessons the hard way from it :-); BuildStream development is ongoing and I’m even still hopeful we can achieve the original goal of making it an order of magnitude easier to produce a high quality Free Software operating system. I should note that Codethink also contributes financially to conferences and projects in various ways.

I should also point out that we are still hiring. This wasn’t intended to be a marketing essay in which I talked up how great the company is, but it kinda has turned out out that way. I guess you take that as a good sign. My real underlying goal was to make it a bit clearer what it’s like to work here which I hope I’ve done a little.

I am quite proud of the company’s approach to hiring, we take in many graduates who show promise but never got involved in community-driven software projects or never really even got into programming except as a module in a science degree or whatever. Of course we also welcome people who do have relevant experience but they can be hard to find and focusing on them can also have an undesired effect of selecting based on certain privileges. I was debating with Tristan last week whether a consultancy is actually a good place for inexperienced developers to be, there is the problem that you don’t get to see the results of your work very often, you often move between projects fairly frequently and so you might not develop the intuition needed for being a good software maintainer, which is a complex topic but boils down to something like: “Is this going to cause problems in 5 years time?” There’s no real way around this, all we can do is give people a chance in an environment with a strong Free Software culture and that is pretty much what we do.

Ideally here I’d end with some photos from the party but I’m terrible at taking photos so it’s just all the back of people’s heads and lurid green lighting. Instead here’s a photo of a stranger taking a photo of me this afternoon while I was out biking round the river Mersey this afternoon.

Cake photo by Robert Marshall