Codethink - Providing Genius

Teleca founder Paul Sherwood joins Codethink

2010-10-01T00:00:00Z

We’re delighted to announce that Codethink’s management team has been strengthened by the arrival of Paul Sherwood.

Paul brings a broad range of experience in management, delivery and sales for demanding software projects. He’s worked at many levels – from test-monkey to strategy consultant, from embedded hacker to heading a hundred-strong international sales team.

Some career highlights:

started programming 30 years ago, writing games for the ZX81
won Teleca's first customer, executed Teleca's first project
project manager on Psion's award winning PsiWin product in 1995
established Teleca's relationship with Nokia in 1999

Paul takes over as CEO from Rob Taylor, Codethink’s founder. Rob will now lead our engineering and consulting team as CTO.

Quote from Rob: “Paul’s extensive industry experience positions Codethink for a new phase of growth.”

Quote from Paul: “I’m very excited to be working with Codethink. Open source is a whole new world for me, and it’s great to be rediscovering sed, vi, grep and awk after all this time.”

Big new exciting stuff

2011-02-01T00:00:00Z

Codethink recently started work on a new solution to improve communication, effectiveness and traceability on large-scale distributed projects.

Once you’ve been around for a while you realize that big projects are usually driven by series of sub-optimal decisions and deadline nightmares.

The result is often miscommunication, bloated and inefficient code, project overruns and an excessive maintenance burden.

Traditional management methods – both waterfall and agile – really struggle to route information and maximise effective work on large projects. Often the engineers at the codeface find themselves isolated and slowed down by the project management processes and infrastructure.

Successful large-scale open source projects have mostly solved these problems! But in many cases the solutions appear so deeply geeky that industry leaders reject them out of hand.

Our ultimate aim is to bring the benefits of hard-core open source best-practices to a much wider audience.

For more information contact Paul Sherwood on +44 788 798 4900

Voices in Vehicles

2011-02-01T00:00:00Z

Codethink develops innovative voice-based UI approach for in-vehicle applications

Recently we’ve been hard at work putting leading voice frameworks for TTS (text-to-speech) and ASR (automatic speech recognition) through their paces on MeeGo, Android and Ubuntu.

Sphinx, the open source ASR solution fares surprisingly well against some stiff proprietary competition.

Clearly there’s no magic bullet in this space, but our work shows that intelligent voice-driven UI design can lead to a rewarding user experience while ensuring safety and legal compliance for drivers.

For more information please call Paul +44 788 798 4900

The Software Commandments V2

2011-02-10T00:00:00Z

Way back in 1996, our CEO wrote and presented a short paper spelling out software best practices for coding, design, test and estimation – The Software Commandments.

Since then Agile, XP and Open Source have swept through the industry, causing major changes in software engineering perception, practice and management. But The Software Commandments still hold true.

Even with burn down charts, daily meetings and ace programmers, many projects still

run over time and budget
deliver the wrong things
fall into the same traps, for the same reasons.

The Software Commandments have remained a well-kept secret – until now!

If you’re git-savvy, you can pull (or fork) from git@github.com:devcurmudgeon/software_commandments.git

Alternatively you can email paul.sherwood at codethink.co.uk to get your own PDF version, absolutely free.

Codethink heads to the big city with Jon Soar

2011-02-25T00:00:00Z

We’re delighted to announce that Jonathan Soar has signed up to help Codethink expand our capabilities to support and deliver with customers in and around London UK.

Jon brings to Codethink a wealth of experience in software services, particularly in the banking and finance sector. He ran his own software house and consultancy in the City of London for over a decade specialising in custom systems and applications for major investment banks.

He’s also a Liveryman of the City of London and speaks fluent French.

Codethink and Canonical

2011-02-26T00:00:00Z

Many of our guys have worked alongside Canonical engineers on irc and email for years. Now we’re pleased to announce that we’ve strengthened the commercial relationship between Canonical and Codethink. We are pitching in on several projects for the upcoming Ubuntu release.

Codethink sees Canonical as a strategic partner, and we are delighted to be helping Canonical deliver advanced software solutions and services around Ubuntu for OEMs, ODMs and integrators and end users.

For more information about how Canonical and Codethink can help you, please call Paul Sherwood on +44 788 798 4900

Software Commandments upgrade now online

2011-07-14T00:00:00Z

After extensive beta testing and positive feedback we’re pleased to confirm that Codethink’s update of the Software Commandments is now officially released into the public domain, and is available at

codethink.co.uk/commandments

Particular attention has been given to dealing with projects involving Agile processes, and also to co-ordinating work involving distributed teams.

We recommend all users of the original 1996 version to upgrade immediately.

Move to bigger offices

2011-09-17T00:00:00Z

As many visitors to Codethink will know, we have been improvising without a meeting room for most of this year.

So lots of folks have been wandering with us past the canal to the lovely Drip Coffee cafe for meetings, job interviews, and even customer project discussions.

Earlier this month we finally moved along the corridor into bigger, loft-style offices with plenty of space for our expanding technical team. Now we have a dedicated meeting room, kitchen, and even a quarantined area for our sales guys – complete with smoking balcony.

It’s lovely :)

New kids on the block

2011-10-15T00:00:00Z

We’re delighted to welcome some new (and old) faces who’ve joined the Codethink swat team over the last year.

Ben Brewer (flatmush) – crosses the closed/open divide in a single bound, particularly to do low-level graphics.

Dan Firth (danfirth) – maths whizz who’s been wasted working on web games, now digging into real code – the Linux kernel.

Daniel Silverstone (kinnison) – started coding aged five. Likes cooking, fencing, and hard core cryptography.

J P Lacerda (jplacerda) – moonlighting @Codethink while tackling Comp Sci at Man Uni.

James Thomas (radiofree) – has been hanging around in #meego and #tracker. Also into ai, imagerec, tts, asr and stuff that’s really hard to code.

Javier Jardón (jjardon) – he’s the only person at Codethink with a Masters in FOSS – and our go-to-guy for GTK+ and GNOME.

Lars Wirzenius (liw) – probably needs no introduction.

Luc Verhaegen (libv) – allegedly the bad boy of the FOSS graphics driver community – but really Luc’s just a big cuddly teddy bear.

Maria Turk (mariatu) – graphics design and interaction design wizard/witch.

Pete Fotheringham (petefoth) – you name it, he’s happy to code with it. Or correct your spelling of it.

Richard Maw (richard_maw) – fresh from claiming his 1st in Comp Sci, now learning boot and kernel from the ground up.

Sam Thursfield (ssam2) – already deeply involved in Tracker and GNOME, Sam’s another Codethinker that started coding before his tenth birthday.

Codethink joins Linux Foundation

2011-10-18T00:00:00Z

You may have heard already that Codethink has joined the Linux Foundation to collaborate on advancing Linux across industries and throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

We shall be at LinuxCon Europe and ELC in Prague next week, primarily discussing issues around delivery of embedded Linux solutions.

If all goes to plan we’ll also be demonstrating the new Ubuntu Core distribution working with Trebuchet.