Return to Codethink

2020 was a year full of surprises, so surprise that I finished it by returning to work in the same job that I left exactly 3 years ago.

There are a few reasons I did that! I will someday blog in more detail about working as a language teacher. It’s a fun job but to make the most of it you have to move around regularly, and I unexpectedly found a reason to settle in Santiago. Codethink kindly agreed that I could join the ongoing remote-work revolution and work from here.

Three years is a long time. What changed since I left? There’s a much bigger and nicer office in Manchester, with nobody in it due to the pandemic. The company is now grouped into 4 internal divisions. This is still an experiment and it adds some management overhead, also helps to maintain a feeling of autonomy in a company that’s now almost 100 people. (When I started there ten years ago, I think there were seventeen employees?!)

I also want to mention some research projects that my colleagues are working on. Codethink is a services company, but has always funded some non-customer work including in the past work on dconf, Baserock, Buildstream and the Freedesktop SDK. These are termed ‘internal investments’ but they are far from internal, the goal is always to contribute to open software and hardware projects. The process for deciding where to invest has improved somewhat in my absence; it still requires some business case for the investment (I’m still thinking how to propose that I get paid to work on music recommendations and desktop search tools all day), but there is now a process!

Here are two things that are being worked on now:

RISC-V

My contribution to Codethink’s RISC-V research was writing an article about it. The tl;dr is we are playing with some RISC-V boards, mainly in the context of Freedesktop SDK. Since writing that article the team tracked down a thorny bug in how qemu-user uses GLib that had been blocking progress, and got GNOME OS running in qemu-system-riscv. Expect to see a video soon. You can thank us when you get your first RISC-V laptop 🙂

Bloodlight

I never worked on a medical device but some of my colleagues have, and this led to the Bloodlight project. It’s an open hardware device for measuring your heart rate, aiming to avoid some pitfalls that existing devices fall into:

Existing technology used in smart watches suffers various shortcomings, such as reduced effectiveness on darker skin tones and tattoos.

There is a lot of technical info on the project on Github, including an interesting data processing pipeline. Or for a higher level overview, the team recently published an article at coruzant.com.

As is often the case, I can’t say exactly what I’m working on right now, other than it’s an interesting project and I am learning more than I ever wanted about Chromium.