Photo by Glen MacLarty – A woolly jumper being knitted (…probably not from Yak’s wool)

Do all developers know the phrase “yak shaving”? Apparently not. I see it being introduced to a new generation of developers here.

What does it mean?

“yak shaving” …the alternative explanation.

You’re an engineer. You have a problem:  you’re feeling a bit cold.

• You turn up the heating, but you decide it’s better to find a jumper to put on.
• You find a nylon sweater, but you want to do this properly. You need a woolly jumper.
• You go out to the shops to buy a woolly jumper. There’s good options, but nothing in a perfect size and shape for you. You decide the only really kick-ass solution would be to knit yourself a good thick woolly jumper.
• You look through some wool you already have, but since you’ll be spending quite some time on this knitting project, you decide you want some really premium quality wool.
• Back to the shops to select the very best wool, but you’re not satisfied. If it’s worth finding good wool, you decide it’s worth going to the source of the supply chain where the wool is produced.
• You go on a multi-day trek around the top wool-producing sheep farms, but as you learn more about wool you discover that the very best type of wool is from the Himalayan yak.
• …and so it is that you end up on a hillside in the Himalayas, in the baking hot sun   …shaving a yak.

Origins

I like this explanation, but it is “the alternative explanation”, because I’ve no idea where it came from! Can’t find any reference to it on the internet. I think I was taught this by Andy Allan while I was working at CloudMade. A few years ago I introduced “yak shaving” to workmates at TransportAPI, to much hilarity.

For the real origins of the “yak shaving” phrase, all googles lead to Seth Godin‘s blog, which references, Joi Ito’s blog, which references an O’Reilly Book on productivity, and [oopse. now that’s going a bit recursive], but  no there’s lots of pointers to the real origin, which I find a bit disappointing: A “Yak Shaving Day” segment of a Renn & Stimpy episode.

I suppose it’s disappointing because Ren & Stimpy is so unbearably bizarre I can’t get my head around it, but also I was hoping for the origins to have some better link with our tech community use of the “yak shaving” phrase. Oh well.

A month ago I started a new job. This is a big deal for me because I’d been in at TransportAPI for eight years. But time for a new job in 2018! I’ve just started at OpenCorporates.

OpenCorporates provides company listings data. It has a database of corporate entities, rather like Companies House in the UK, but bringing together this and similar datasets from countries all around the world.

Now “company listings data” may sound rather dull, but there’s a couple of aspects of this which I think are quite exciting: open data and… fighting crime and injustice!

Open Data

At one stage the Companies House website was only open during working hours (Yes. Hilariously the website’s clunky querying interface stopped working after 6pm!). Aside from making itself a target of general ridicule from tech people, companies house also became a target of the emerging “open data” campaign at the time. About a decade ago the guardian “Free Our Data” column was leading the march, campaigning for data releases. I also remember attending a “National Hack the Government” event hosted by the guardian, with all sorts of hijinks of civic hacking tech people who were producing better versions of government websites and, if necessary, taking data by force (brute force scraping) to do so.

From these kinds of mischievous beginnings OpenCorporates was born. I remember bumping into Chris Taggart at various conferences and events around this time, while I was generally running around beating the OpenStreetMap drum. Later I ended up working with TransportAPI, and TransportAPI ended up sharing an office space with OpenCorporates at the Open Data Institute for a while.

Companies House went on to get their act together considerably (spurred on by those early civic hackers no doubt). Meanwhile OpenCorporates continues to campaign for open data releases from other governments around the world. My point is, OpenCorporates is very much historically and currently part of the open data movement. I regard any open data work as a kind of “social good”, but if you think about it, company listings are really a flagship example of the kind of dataset any government absolutely should be making public and easy to use.

Fighting crime and injustice!

This brings me onto the other aspect. A more dramatic kind of “social good”. OpenCorporates, by making company listings data more available, is fighting crime and injustice …if a little indirectly.

A “registered company” might be a high-street shop or some other real-world bricks-and-mortar thing, but often not. Registered companies are legal and financial constructs which get used and abused in all sorts of ways. We see examples of dodgy dealings on any episode of “rogue traders” where it invariably reveals how bad people closed down a company, and re-started under a new name to shake off the authorities. It’s clearly too easy to get away with. Company listings data provides a little bit of an antidote by helping with transparency and knowing who you are doing business with.

But that’s just small time fraud. When I started at OpenCorporates they gave me a copy of the book “Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World” by Nicholas Shaxson. It describes tax avoidance, tax evasion, money-laundering, and flows of criminal funds enabled by offshore “secrecy jurisdictions”. It builds up a picture of this as not just a side-show by a dishonest minority, but widespread deeply embedded system of corrupting influence benefitting the rich and powerful, at the expense of everyone else. The problem feels unsolvable as we realise that the corruption runs deep within all of our governments.

“Rich governments cannot be trusted to do the right thing on tax havens and transparency. Many will demand more transparency and international cooperation even as they work to frustrate both. They will call for reasoned debate as they engage in character assassination  secret deals and worse. They will talk the language of democracy and freedom the better to defend unaccountable, irresponsible power and privilege.”

It’s a pretty eye-opening and pretty horrifying book!

The book details some specific financial tricks and loopholes, but generally the idea for a global company (or crime syndicate, or just a wealthy individual) is to have your accountants and lawyers create a tangled web of different corporate entities registered in different jurisdictions, with maximum secrecy making it almost impossible for tax authorities or financial regulators to pin down your assets, profits, risks, and capital. There are many layers of financial trickery, but it’s clear that corporate registrations are the key vehicle for this kind of skullduggery.

As such, data on registered corporate entities is vital. It doesn’t solve all the problems of financial secrecy. Investigators will need to piece together a lot more about companies, their assets, the true owners and beneficiaries, and their links with other entities, in order to cut through the information void created deliberately to bamboozle them. But it’s a start. Company listings form a kind of information bed-rock upon which other information and investigation can be built. Whether it’s an investigative journalist looking to crack open a high profile case, or a tax authority, or a just somebody looking to establish the trustworthiness of a company, OpenCorporates helps enable this important work. It puts the information out there more publicly and in more useful formats to help shed a little bit of light on this murky world of crime and tax dodging.

Maybe “fighting crime and injustice”, is a super-style exaggeration. Folks like the Tax Justice Network are tackling this big problem more head on, but OpenCorporates helps chip away at the problem with a more bottom-up data-oriented approach.

The new job

So I’m getting my head into this new subject area, and joining OpenCorporates as a software engineer. It’s primarily Ruby on Rails development, but with lots of infrastructure and data processing challenges. Fun stuff! We’re based in the main pointy tower at Canary Wharf. We just had our office warming party in a new place 42 storeys up.

If you fancy joining me there, we are hiring back-end engineers, infrastructure engineers, and data analysts. Check out jobs.opencorporates.com!

Here’s a little thing I just found (I have lots of silly bits of code like this kicking around) :

Printable Calendar

Generate a calendar in a strip layout, suitable for printing, with lots of space for writing notes next to each date.

I originally did this as a visual basic word macro, then later as this php script.

I used to use this to do big calendar printouts to help with family logistics, usually at this time of year, covering the months around Christmas. That’s back when we four kids were all home for Christmas in Yorkshire, all with our own overlapping plans. Nowadays we might do a shared google calendar instead, but I remember the scrawlings all over the calendar wall used to be quite fun.

I’ve just been tidying some old content on this website, which I’d written just over 10 years ago now. Back then I wrote a kind of tech manifesto, or at least a collection of various broad thoughts of tech and the IT industry I was working in at the time. I haven’t worked as an enterprise integration consultant since 2009, and some of it is out-of-date in various other ways. Some of it feels like it’s noticeably coming from my naive younger self.

• I hate the word “geek”. I don’t really hate the word of course, and that’s not the point I was trying to make. I stand by the idea that we should always work to close the separation between “geeks” and “normal people”. The march of technological progress does this for us of course. If I think back to 2007, the internet was actually a lot less mainstream. Fewer people with broadband at home (including me!). Fewer people required to use the internet or even computers as part of their work. It used to be that “geeks” were people who knew how to use computers and were super savvy with the internet. Nowadays that’s everyone. My 2 year old son is already getting the hang of it! Nowadays I see an interesting push to get more people from more diverse backgrounds to learn to code.
• It’s a people thing was a piece complaining that clients should discuss high level requirements rather than skipping ahead to designing a solution. This is an accepted anti-waterfall principle rolled into “agile” these days. Perhaps it goes without saying, …except it’s still a common mistake. I recall a few occasions since writing that, when I’ve worked on projects which jumped to discussing a technical solution before getting a high level view of problems we were solving.

  I also talked about user interface design. I think I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the project I was on at the time, but I do remember leaving that particular project with great satisfaction at having implemented some of the UI ideas despite initially having them shot down. Since then there has been a couple of times where I’ve found myself surprised by colleagues’ failure to see obvious UI improvements. It makes me wonder whether user interface design is a talent I’ve not really appreciated within myself. Maybe I should do more of that kind of work.

• With IT project politics, I was talking in general terms, but really I was bearing my soul about some frustrations with my consulting job. Some of the assignments with Green Hat Consulting involved parachuting into a pretty hostile environment. When I quit that industry and went to work in a more fresh funky start-up I left the politics behind on the whole, but of course you never really escape that kind of thing completely. I guess the golden rule I still have to remind myself of would be: work with people you like (and if you don’t, leave, because life’s too short)
• Maintainable Software. Maybe I had a fairly simplistic view of what makes good software back then, but I think I was just glossing over the details. Obviously there’s a whole universe of coding best practices which make code maintainable, beyond “comments and meaningful variable names”. In fact comments are bad …sometimes. I think keeping up with recommendations and knowing which wisdom to follow and which to discard may be the real skill. Being an “opinionated coder”, and taking pride in your craft. In any case, I’m sure I was correct in saying that most developers consider their own code to be good code. …and I still didn’t learn to drive!

  I was also ranting about documentation. Again I think this was a bee I had my bonnet related a particular request to document a particular project at the time. But it remains a reasonable point, that documentation can be seen as an afterthought; a project delivery box to tick. I quite like documentation. The interesting challenge of trying to distill the most important hand-over information for a project, without making something which is just too long for anyone to bother reading. Also mechanisms to help ensure docs are kept up-to-date e.g. keeping docs close to the code or part of the code. I like that github have established (or helped reinforce) a convention of supplying a README file for each repo.

On the whole my “tech manifesto” of a decade ago wasn’t too bad, but a lot’s happened in 10 years, and some of these thoughts were starting to feel quite old. So I decided today that they belong in the blog archive.

But what would I write about if I were to pick some points to make about tech and the IT industry in 2017? (Not sure we even call it the “IT industry” so much these days). I don’t think I would try. Clearly such things are destined to go out of date. A single page of thoughts also feels incomplete, but maybe I should add some more deep thinking to the blog category ‘technology’

[Update: They’ve now hired a rails developer. Thanks for the responses! Still opportunities to help I’m sure. I will to try post an update on how to get involved]

I wanted to help promote this Ruby on Rails developer job at OpenCity which I think will be a really interesting thing for somebody, maybe a junior rails developer. Know anyone?

If you’re a londoner you’ve probably heard of “Open House” an event taking place each year where, for one day, you can take a look around lots of interesting buildings, for free, which are often closed to the public the rest of the time.

The Open House event is put together by a not-for-profit organisation called OpenCity, in their office near Aldgate. From there they organise this annual architectural bonanaza, coordinating hundreds of people (volunteers and building owners) with lots of careful planning …and some IT challenges.

Being an interesting and fun not-for-profit organisation, I have ended up volunteering a bit of my time with them. Me and another volunteer have been planning a rebuild of a database system they’re using internally, which will later ripple up to some cool improvements on their public facing website.

To me this looks like a juicy challenge and a fun organisation to be helping out, so I’m hoping we can find a suitable available developer who feels the same! I’m not available myself, except in my spare time. I plan to be dipping in on this project from time-to-time, so I would be working with this person a little bit.

The project planning is at a very early stage, but I’ve been drawing the above diagrams which show… (left-to-right)

• Their current set-up
• An initial milestone introducing a rails app for their buildings database
• And a final situation with websites and database consolidated

Hopefully in the end we will have managed to consolidate things and four different websites (or four different user journeys/permission levels within the same website) will be served by a lovely new rails app!

OpenCity are very open to our ideas, and one thing we’ve suggested, is to do this whole thing open source on github, as a way of being open to contribution from any other developers who fancy helping this organisation, but this is a pretty big job which will need somebody on it full time. Hopefully quite an interesting challenge for somebody! Please pass this on to anyone who might be interested.