This blog is about the process, fun, sadness, madness and back to fun again of working in, managing, delivering, failure, success and thoughts about the software business.
It’s more specific to the security software business, but, on the whole, software is software.
Certain things about the software business, or more usually the software businesses interaction with users, tend to make me a bit mad. I’ll discuss them here, and try to get your thoughts and feedback.
I’ve been doing technology for a rather long time now. I first had email and was making, editing and participating in web-related stuff in 1995. It seems an age ago now, we’ve come a long way since, but in many ways we’ve stood still too.
Over the years, I’ve worked for Hewlett-Packard, Systinet, ALWIL Software (avast! antivirus) and SPAMfighter, to name just a few. I started in hardware (as an engineer) and slowly moved to software, first technically, then management. I studied computing at university (I also spent seven years in education studying electronic engineering), and soon found out that coding, at least day-to-day wasn’t really for me. It certainly helps understanding it, but I also prefer to manage and create on the business side. I will still, on the odd occasion, get my hands dirty in PHP, C and now Ruby (on Rails), but only for the joy of doing something myself, rather than to earn a crust.
My career has also encompassed some interludes from tech, such as producing films (two successfully in the can), as well as documentation writing, a brief and disastrous foray into retail management (oh, please, never again!), but somehow tech always pulls me back.
I was born in Oxford in the UK, raised in Australia until I was almost ten, lived back in the UK, spent nine years in Prague, Czech Republic and now reside in Copenhagen, Denmark. I have a beagle (Alma) and a ginger Tom named Juhi. They keep me sane and drive me crazy at the same time, as I am sure I do them. 
Finally, I’m a Mac fan; I don’t participate in the question “Mac or PC?” (the answer is obvious, surely, Mac), because it rather depends on what computing your are doing and your preferences as to the tools you use to do what you do. I believe strongly, however, that if you want to make money from software, you either need to be developing SaaS or for the PC platform, but if you want completeness, you should be on PC, Mac, Linux, Solaris and HP-UX. Possibly AIX too, but that’s up for debate.
I hope you’ll find something to your liking here. Or if not, participate and tell me why. Even if you do, participate anyway, agreement makes me know I’ve got at least one supporter of my views.
