I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.

— 1996 —

That second winter in America, New York had the worst snowstorm in 100 years with 20 inches of snow and drifts over 10 feet deep. I lived only a few minutes from Wall Street so I set off for work as usual but I was one of only 7 people out of 10,000 who made it so I went back home again. It took the city about two weeks to clear the snow and we were stuck in our apartment for most of that time. There were snowbergs floating down the Hudson River.

Chris came round one evening for a beer and we all moaned about the snow and the cold. Mrs Clown complained about being stuck in our apartment with a new baby and asked if there was anywhere warmer we could live. Chris said “I work for a company in California. It’s warm there. Why don’t we all go work in Silicon Valley?”

We put our hands in the middle and made a vow:

We braved the New York snow for a while longer.

The Internet was just getting started about this time and we decided to build our next application for the World Wide Web. We learned HTTP and HTML and this new programming language, Java. Long story short, we built and launched one of the first Java applications in the world. It was another huge success but suddenly it was July and we remembered we were supposed to be going to California.

The only place to chat online in those days was Usenet and I found a forum for jobs in California. A couple of weeks later I walked through the brand new doors of Alphablox.

AlphaBlox was just across the street from Netscape and on the day we arrived, Jeremy and Michael had just come back from their first meeting with Netscape’s CFO who pulled out his chequebook and wrote a cheque for a million dollars. The first few thousand dollars went on custom door handles in the shape of the company logo. A few more tens of thousands went on custom-built furniture to match the logo colours. The Dot-Com Boom had begun.

The company put us up in beautiful apartments on the Sand Hill Road while we looked for somewhere permanent to live. Chris moved to California too and we both bought shiny new convertibles and went out on the town in Palo Alto every night. We felt like Masters of the Universe.

The founders of Alphablox wanted some of that Masters of the Universe lifestyle too. We had intense induction sessions for new employees where we shared our wildest dreams. We all signed the huge wall that was soon so full of signatures we needed a bigger wall. We had parties every Friday afternoon and we hosted celebrity guests, played volleyball and drank wine. Everyone in Silicon Valley came to party — especially the folks who wanted to come and work for us. I made some of my best friends in those early days and they’re still my best friends 30 years later.

One morning, I had a dreadful flu and struggled into work. I was just about to go back home when Jeremy came over and said, “I am going to change your day! Michael is at a conference in Arizona and he just talked to Bill Gates. He wants you to fly out and give a demo this afternoon.” We didn’t even have a demo at that time. We didn’t even have a product. But I took my laptop on the plane and started coding, nearly dying of the flu.

The conference was in Scottsdale, Arizona and by invitation only. All the Silicon Valley bigwigs were there — all the famous venture capitalists and the CEOs of Yahoo and Sun and a hundred other tech boom companies — but I carried on coding. I finished my demo with minutes to spare and just before Michael got a phone call saying the demo was cancelled because Bill Gates was busy with something else. I went and sat by the pool with all the venture capitalists’ wives instead.

At Alphablox, we hired some of the strangest characters I have ever met. We hired Extropians who were preparing to become post-human. Two young women were part-time strippers. Two young men went to watch them strip while they ate their lunch. When I interviewed Romana, her resume had a link to her porn site. Maybe 60% of our first 100 employees were what you might call ‘interesting characters’. We even hired Chris.

Everything was magical for a while and we dreamed dreams of the wonderful software we were going to build and we made plans to change the world. It was fun for a couple of years.

I learned a lot at AlphaBlox. I learned that if you put together a team of twenty-something developers who hate each other you can reconstruct Lord of the Flies without the civilising influence of the conch. Version One of the AlphaBlox product taught me that you can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time if you spend vast sums on marketing.

Each product release began with a requirements document that no one read. The requirements document was turned into a technical spec that no one read and then we’d code frantically for a month. No one talked to anyone else and we’d stop coding six weeks before the end of the release so the testers could test and the writers could write the documentation. At least, we were supposed to stop coding — but no one was even close to being finished and the testers were still testing the previous release. As the release got closer, we’d have a daily Bug Court where we’d decide which bugs to fix. Bug Court was a madhouse overflowing with angry uproar. Every stupid decision was made under a cloud of hatred. Should we fix the buttons that had mysteriously turned pink? Noooo! Too dangerous!

It was about this time that people started getting fired.

The rowdiest people in Bug Court were soon gone, closely followed by the entire leadership of the engineering team. We software folks were left to our own devices with no management to speak of. With no one to tell us otherwise, we scrapped the old system and built a new one. When we hired a new VP of Engineering, he took a quick look at what we were up to and said “Well, you guys seem to know what you are doing. Let me know if you need anything.”

Before long we were writing great software again. It was all super fun and we built an awesome application that made us lots of money.

Our families became good friends. We had picnics and went camping in the Santa Cruz Mountains and got a cabin at Tahoe. Bobby took me snowboarding at Squaw Valley, taking me down a double black diamond and through the trees on my first weekend. On a different day, one of those trees stabbed me in the forehead, broke my goggles and made me bleed a lot. I got pretty good at snowboarding though and Little Clown learned to ski too.

Alphablox began to do well and we started hiring again. We hired dozens of VPs of Sales and dozens of VPs of Marketing and VPs of Business Development. The character of a company changes when the technical folks are outnumbered by the business folks and we soon stopped building great software. Instead, we built crappy stuff that a VP of Sales had promised to a customer who barely even knew what they wanted. The final joke came when our technical(ish) CEO was fired and was replaced by a Sales CEO to manage all the other VPs of Sales. You can probably guess the punchline.

We got rid of about a third of the staff in the first round of layoffs and another third in the next round. I requested to be laid off in the next round. A few VPs of Sales and Marketing asked me to stay but my mind was made up. I had tears in my eyes as I walked out the door.

Alphablox was acquired by IBM soon after and I sometimes wonder if I would have enjoyed it had I stayed. I would’ve enjoyed the money but I am a start-up kind of guy and was glad to move on.

— 2002 —

I tried starting my own company after Alphablox. Extreme Programming was all the rage and I built a project management tool that captured the mood of XP. I sold a few copies but starting a company in the middle of a recession wasn’t the best of ideas. Eventually, the loneliness drove me mad and I had to look for a proper job.

My next startup, Agitar, had a similar story to Alphablox. Most people who work in tech don’t actually do anything technically difficult — it’s mostly just login boxes and connecting to a database. But the technology at Agitar was incredibly advanced.

We won InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year Award and a Duke Award and a Jolt Award and my salary went up and up. But as we started to become successful — and hired some more VPs of Sales — the leadership took us in a direction that was pretty stupid and we folded after just a few years.

Practically everyone at Agitar went to work for Google or Apple but I’d had enough of Silicon Valley and went to work in Portland, Oregon instead.

— 2008 —

I’ll tell you all about Portland next week.

I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.

— 1994 —

After we got married, we went to live in Plymouth, England. We had just bought an apartment on Plymouth Hoe and had been there less than a year when — out of the blue — I got invited for an interview for a job in America. I didn’t want to go to America but my new wife said,

“Just go for the interview and see what they have to say.”

I loved my new wife so I agreed to go.

“Just for the interview though! No promises!”

I went for the interview in London with maybe 80 other developers. They didn’t have specific job offers in mind for us — they just hired about ten of us and let us choose from a menu of job offers all across America. I was offered a choice between Mary Kay in Dallas, a trucking company in Portland, and JP Morgan on Wall Street. If I took the Wall Street job, my salary would be 4x what I was earning in Plymouth.

Three weeks later, Mrs Clown and I were having dinner with my new boss in the Empire State Building.  Manhattan was everything we knew from the movies. It was hot, hot, hot and there was steam coming out of the sidewalk.

The day I arrived on Wall Street, my new team was launching an application that would allow traders to check if they had enough credit before making a billion-dollar trade. A trans-Atlantic team had been working on the app for over a year, but that very first day, the app crashed, and the traders had to go back to old-fashioned pieces of paper.

My new boss said he didn’t have time to get me settled in, but maybe I could build a backup system while they tried to get the real system working.

Boss: Do you know Solaris? 
Me: No.

Boss: Do you know AWK?
Me: No.

Boss: Do you know SQL?
Me: No.

Boss: Do you know Excel?
Me: No.

Boss: Do you know VB Script?
Me: No.

Boss: OK. Here’s what you are gonna do. You are gonna write a SQL script that runs every night and grabs all the credit data from the database. You are gonna generate an Excel spreadsheet using AWK then write a script that generates charts and allows traders to see what credit they have available.  We don’t have a desk for you yet so you will have to share with Laurie.

I got my script working in a few days and rolled it out on the trading floor. The traders loved it.

When the real application was ready a week or so later, the traders refused to use it because my application was better. Most of the team that built the original application got fired on the spot, and I joined a new team to build a replacement.

A few months later, the project lead of my new team left to have her bab,y and they put me in charge. 

This was one of the best teams I’ve ever worked with. Joe, Nital and I worked on the back end. Chris designed the user interface. I designed the database, and Peter was our boss. We had a lot of fun together at lunch every day on South Street Seaport and nights out in Battery Park City, where we lived.

— 1995 —

Our new baby was born in Brooklyn in ‘95, and when I came to the end of my contract, we made plans to go home to Englan,d but JP Morgan offered to hire me and doubled my salary. We stayed.

Most weekends, Mrs Clown and I walked up to Central Park and back, through Tribeca and Soho and The Village and Chelsea and the Theater District. We chose a different avenue every week. Some weekends we went shopping in Newark or gambling in Atlantic City. Another weekend, we took a bus out to Wilkes-Barre for a party in a trailer park with some random people that Mrs Clown had met on the brand new internet.

Mrs Clown had 183 relatives on Long Island (they are probably up in the 1000s by now). Before we moved to Battery Park City, we lived with Uncle Romeo and Aunty Nina in Queens for a couple of months. We often rode the Long Island Railroad out to Port Jeff to see cousin Dianne and Tony, and almost every weekend in summer, there was a different block party to go to. We got very good at the Electric Slide.

JP Morgan had a big push at the time to hire contractors from India. We had three contractors working on database scripts for months, but they were useless. One day, Chris and I were chatting over a beer, and Chris asked me: “What are you going to do about those database scripts? They don’t work.”

“Don’t worry”, I said. “I’ll fix them.”

I didn’t have the authority to fire the contractors, but a couple of weeks before launch day, I scrapped everything they had written and rewrote it. They were fired the week after that.

When launch day came, we were Champions of the Flying Wheel. JP Morgan had a massive launch party with maybe 100 people we’d never met before. One by one, these super-high bosses got up on stage to make speeches about how proud they were and how this was the first project in ten years to finish on time and under budget.

They never once mentioned the team that built it.

I’m writing down some memories.
Start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.

— 2012 —

Smart Patients was the most amazing adventure. It felt good to do good.

We started out in an office inside NASA in Mountain View. Our neighbours on one side were designing 3D printers for the International Space Station. On the other side, they were building a real-life version of the Star Trek Tricorder. The rest of the floor was rented by Singularity University who were teaching geniuses to invent a new future. We shared stories, drank beer and talked about the future every Friday afternoon.

Later, we moved into a garage with Chris the Photographer. We worked at our standing desks while Chris took photos of the San Jose Ballet behind us. We played football in the park a couple of times a week.

Smart Patients built online communities for patients and caregivers. In those early days, we knew most of our members by name and many became our friends. Susumu sent me a calendar from Japan every year. Norma Jean baked us a cake!

When I was diagnosed with cancer, Mrs Clown and Robin secretly asked our members to send me a card and they flooded in from all over the world.

Over the years, we’ve had around 100,000 members. One time, we invited a bunch of patients and their families down to California and each told us a story about their diseases and their lives. It was incredibly moving to speak with patients who were dying and it was all the more moving when they died. Moyra, John, Neil, Ron, Shaun, Mike, Gary, Photoman and too many more — you live on in my heart.

One memorable weekend, Mrs Clown, Gilles and I drove up to visit Stephanie on a farm in Napa Valley. Stephanie was one of our earliest members and she was dying of three cancers at the same time. She wanted to be sure we would take care of her community when she was gone. My memories burn bright.

— 2017 —

I’ve never worked so hard as I did in those early years. There’s something special about building an application from just a whiteboard full of ideas. We hung out every day to discuss every aspect of the business. We hired a few more people later but things soon got bumpy and one of the founders quit. We began to struggle financially and acquired a survey company to try to raise additional revenue.

Building surveys was not my cup of tea though and when my kids finished school, we made plans to come home to England and I’ve worked remotely for the last few years.

We were just about to buy our new house in England when the CEO told me he was quitting too and he left me in charge. I’m a pretty good software developer but I’m not much of a CEO and things continued to go downhill.

When COVID happened, our customers stopped paying us and when I got my diagnosis, I decided I couldn’t do it any more and Kathryn took over as CEO. I went back to writing software and took another pay cut. Then another. Kathryn did a brave job keeping us going and we bumped along the bottom for a couple more years.

It was the best of jobs. It was the worst of jobs.

— 2024 —

All good things come to an end though and it’s time to say goodbye to Smart Patients. I doubt I’ll be looking for another job after this one. I’ve been working since I was sixteen with thirty-five of those years writing software. I think I’ll enjoy some tranquillity for a while.

It’s not all bad though. I’m studying for a degree in philosophy and — fingers crossed — I’ll get that degree I should have studied for 40 years ago. I’ll sit in my comfy chair by the window, read my philosophy books and look out at the harbour with my dog. Maybe I’ll write some more too.

Twenty-four years in America has left us with a medley of memories and an abundance of friends. We never intended to come to America — I always dreamed of Australia — but we had some great adventures and we got two grown-up children out of the deal. But it’s good to be home.

Maybe leave me a comment if you have a memory to share. I’d love to hear from you.

December 2024

Footscray. Council estate. Parents divorce. Grammar school. Top of class. Royal Navy at 16. Engineering apprenticeship. Girlfriend. Destroyer. Falklands. Girlfriend. Sonar engineer. Scotland. Polaris submarine. Midshipman. Quit. Backpack: California, Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora, Huahine, Raitaia; hitchhike: Sydney->Cairns->Darwin; Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Komodo, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma. Whitechapel. Broke. Girlfriend. The C Programming Language. City of London. Girlfriend’s funeral. Malta. Girlfriend. Marry in Jamaica. Malta. Plymouth Hoe. Manhattan. Son. Wall Street. Silicon Valley. Startup (failed). Daughter. Startup (failed). Startup (failed). Portland. San Jose. Startup. Dog. Philosophy degree. Cancer. Bristol Harbourside. Retired.

Now.

Future. Caribbean. Happy ever after.

The end.

I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.

— 2008 —

When Agitar shut down, almost everyone I knew went to work for Google or Apple but I decided I’d had enough of Silicon Valley and went to work in Portland. A friend of mine hired me at WebMD and I took a huge pay cut because living in Oregon was so much cheaper than living in Silicon Valley.

I drove up to Portland and left my family back in California for a few months so the kids could finish school and we could sell the house. Matt from Alphablox had moved up to Portland a few years before and we hung out together almost every day.

My family came up to see me for a few days in April and the first day was wonderful. We had glorious sunshine and strolled around the market by the Willamette River.

As we wandered through the Pearl District, Mrs Clown said,

“This is so lovely we shouldn’t even bother going back to California. We’ll take the kids out of school and let the real estate agent take care of the house.”

The next day it poured with rain. The day after that there was sleet. Then it froze. Then it snowed.

Mrs Clown said,

“I am going back to California now. If you want to stay married, you’ll come with me.”

I told my boss at WebMD that I had to move back to California but he said I should continue working remotely.

“You can come up and see us every month and we’ll have telephone meetings when we need to talk to you.”

So I worked remotely for a few years.

WebMD was my first job where I wasn’t writing software. They were stuck in the old days when product managers churned out specs that nobody read and the QA folk weren’t allowed to talk to developers in case it affected their objectivity. They were in a different part of the building.

I’d been hired as Chief Software Architect and helped a couple of hundred developers transition from a traditional engineering organisation to a modern agile organisation. The first thing we did was tear down the walls and make little self-contained teams, each with its own set of developers, product managers and testers who worked together every day.

This was the time when Portland was re-inventing itself and reinventing the IPAs that would soon take over the world. Every pub had a Top Ten Beer Board showing how hoppy the IPAs were and Matt and I set ourselves a goal to visit every pub in Portland. Even at the airport, they enjoyed a beer and the barmaid in The New Old Lompoc would start pouring my Condor Ale as soon as she saw me turn the corner each month.

— 2012 —

Hanging out with Matt was cool but working remotely was less cool and I spent most of my time on the phone. I barely left our house in San Jose for a couple of years and my mental health started to suffer.

Suddenly, out of the blue, I got two random job offers on the same day. One was from Netflix. Netflix was just down the road from where I lived, so I went to see them.

The Netflix office was the most beautiful office I have ever seen. It was like walking into Steven Speilberg’s guest house. Larger-than-life movie posters on the walls. Lush armchairs. Enormous coffee table books on enormous coffee tables. It was just gorgeous. And they promised me a fortune in salary.

The other was at a brand-new start-up with no money and no office yet. They didn’t even have proper desks. I told Rian about my dilemma over coffee.

“You seem like a start-up kind of guy to me,” said Rian.

I took the startup job and an even more massive pay cut.

I’m writing down some memories.
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I’m writing down some memories.
You can start at Chapter One if you like or just keep reading here.

— 1989 —

When I got back from travelling the world, I got a crappy job fixing electronics on planes at Heathrow and satellite communications on ships in French ports. The crappy job was crappy and I quit after three months with no idea what to do next.

Eventually, I narrowed it down to one of five things.

• I applied for a job on a millionaire’s yacht in Antibes in the Mediterranean.
• I applied for a job fixing satellite tracking equipment on Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
• I applied to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL) in Japan.
• I applied to do a degree in maths at Cambridge University.
• I applied to an adult education class in software engineering in the East End of London.

— 1990 —

I started my adult education class in software engineering in January but the instructor never showed up and most of my fellow students were only there so their unemployment benefits wouldn’t be stopped. Still, they gave me a computer and a copy of The C Programming Language and I taught myself.

The ticket to Antibes for an interview on that yacht arrived a few days later but I’d already made my choice.

Our classroom was next to the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel and we snuck out to play pool every afternoon. In one of the highlights of my pool-playing career, I got on the table at half past eleven in the morning and played undefeated — winner stays on — until the pub closed at eleven PM, even as the pub filled with gangsters.

Three months into my programming class, I got an interview with Total Systems on the City Road in Islington and I started work on Monday. Total Systems was a software consultancy and we did jobs all over London, big and small.

I was absolutely broke when I started that job. I walked miles to work in the City of London every day because I couldn’t afford the bus and I stuffed my shoes with newspaper to keep my feet dry. I could only afford to eat a couple of times a week but I knew the day would come when I was no longer broke and here I am, 35 years later, living in comfort with poverty a distant memory.

This is where it all began.

For my first job, they sent me on my own to fix a C program at Reuters. The program grabbed stock prices from around the world and uploaded it to a mainframe. The bloke who wrote the program didn’t really know C and the program kept crashing. I was the third person to try to fix it. Over the next few weeks, I kept fixing it and it kept crashing until one day I decided to just delete it and rewrite it from scratch. It never crashed again and I never told anyone what I had done.

My next job was a huge project designing a back-office system for financial traders at Shell on the South Bank. We were using a new programming language called Progress (my second favourite language) but everything else about the job was primitive and dysfunctional.

Instead of source control, we had a backup that ran every night. If you needed to go back to a previous version, you restored it from tape. To deploy the software, someone carried the tape to the production server and installed it.

The project went well though and I got promoted from trainee programmer to programmer then analyst programmer.

We were a fun bunch. Three pints in the Hole in the Wall every lunchtime and another five in the evening. Everyone drank stout and when it was your round, the order was eight pints of Guinness, three pints of Murphy’s and one pint of Beamish. The Hole in the Wall was one of those pubs where they took their stout pouring seriously and they would let it stand for a few minutes before they topped it off and drew a shamrock on top.

It was after one such night — after maybe too much Murphy’s — that I had one of my many close-to-death moments.

You know the long, shiny separators between the escalators that take you down to the underground trains? The ones with the Please Stand On The Left signs? Well, this was before the signs and there was nothing to stop drunken revellers from sliding all the way down. When I hit the sign at the bottom, I flew through the air and landed on my back on the metal escalator. I couldn’t walk.

Richard took me home and I had an escalator print on my back for weeks.

— 1992 —

My next gig was building a car insurance system out in Ilford. They had an ancient mainframe computer and we were replacing the whole thing — policies, documents, quotes, claims, accounting and statements — all in this new language, Progress.

It was a big team and, as the most junior member of the team, they had me building the data entry screens. I finished all that in just a couple of weeks and I asked for something meatier. They gave me the calculation engine that figures out premiums and it’s still one of the most complicated pieces of software I ever wrote. I finished it with no bugs and they promoted me to senior analyst programmer and made me the project leader.

The insurance system we built was such a success that we sold it to more insurance companies and it’s still for sale as Ultima thirty years later.

I had a lovely girlfriend at the time and we’d been back and forth to Malta for romantic encounters over the previous year but after a massive argument in September — where she threatened to set fire to my Billie Holiday albums — we parted and vowed never to speak to each other ever again.

A couple of days after Christmas, I was dancing on the tables at The Lord Rodney pub in Whitechapel with some old Navy friends. The DJ was playing Jackie Wilson Said and the girl on the table opposite was making eyes at me.

She was wearing a short, black dress and she was beautiful.

“I think you are in there, Kev!”, said Tony.

But I couldn’t do it and dreams of Maltese romance filled my head.

The next morning, I went to the travel agent and asked them to reserve a Wedding in Paradise for me. On New Year’s Eve, I called my ex-girlfriend in Malta and asked her to marry me.

“Yes!”, said Not-Yet-Mrs Clown.

I quit my job in London a few days later. The Managing Director of Total Systems had a self-imposed rule that he would never go to anyone’s leaving party but he came to mine.

— 1993 —

I had my final beer in The Three Johns at The Angel, Islington (the same pub where Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin planned the Russian Revolution) and we went off to get married in Jamaica.

When we got home, we went to live with my mother-in-law in Malta but that’s a story for next time.