New challenges ahead
TLDR; I'm very excited to be starting a new job on 1st May, where I'll be actively building tech products again, and which is a great fit for me. I'm joining lowRISC, an open source hardware non-profit, using collaborative engineering to create high quality, secure and flexible silicon designs. This is a really exciting opportunity on many levels - a chance to be part of a new wave of fundamental computing innovation enabling specialised silicon chips, to learn about the practicalities of shared engineering resource and IP at the hardware layer, and to actually ship some useful products (hopefully at reasonable scale).
This may seem an unlikely step for me, on top of a possibly disparate-seeming work history, but fits nicely into responsible delivery of practical systems using emerging technologies, which is how I think of my work. I've been lucky enough to do this in a variety of contexts and with different technologies too.
I'm starting at 4 days a week at lowRISC to ensure I've got some time for a little consultancy work around responsible technology, and to provide cover at the Cambridge Computer Lab until my replacement is in post. I'll also be continuing to noodle around questions of how we fund and organise technology development, including through the Open IP research group, and organising the 2019 Festival of Maintenance. (This year, thanks to my Software Sustainability Institute fellowship, I'll also be building connections with the Maintainers in the US.) But now I'll be able to do this with my own experience as a practitioner to help inform it all too.
The last 18 months have been fascinating and deeply educational, but I've not been doing the sort of work I thrive most in - where I can be part of building things, be that technology products or services or systems.
It's been amazing to see Doteveryone develop, becoming a novel and powerful influence in making the tech sector more responsible. I've been really pleased to help the research I started in 2016 become real products supporting businesses to make good choices around technology, to contribute to our policy work, and to learn so much about the social sector (and what it's like working in a team of mostly women!). Riding the wave of growing hype around "tech ethics" (not to mention data ethics and AI ethics), and trying to stay focussed on how we could make practical change was entertaining.
In early 2018 I became Entrepreneur in Residence at the brand new Trust & Technology Initiative at the University of Cambridge, shaping and establishing the multidisciplinary research network. We've uncovered and connected a lot of incredible work across departments which touches in some way on questions of trust, distrust, the internet, society and power. We've been able to create a distinctive position for Trust & Technology and continue to catalyse new conversations and ideas for how these things might change, or be changed, in the future. I'm delighted to be leaving things in the capable hands of my smart colleague Dr Jennifer Cobbe.
It's been super to be physically based out of the Department of Computer Science and Technology. I was in the same building for much of my PhD studies and some things have changed, and others stayed the same. Mostly though it was lovely to be surrounded by so many incredibly smart people, and to have a chance to catch up with the cutting edge of computer science research, and see what interesting things are about to emerge from academia. This has certainly paid off for me, as lowRISC is a spin-out from the department. In September 2018 I took on a part time interim role at the department, facilitating industrial collaboration. This has updated my understanding of how academic research works these days behind the scenes, and reaffirmed my belief that I'm not an academic.
My quest for my next "building something" project drifted along, and I was starting to think that good opportunities were thin on the ground, and perhaps I should either lower my standards, or settle for my existing portfolio of work. It turns out I'm fussy. I've been looking for jobs which I can do from Cambridge (local or remote - but no tedious commuting), which can pay me fairly, using technology (something deeper than 'digital'), which need my skills, present an interesting challenge, will do something useful in the world, don't trigger my moral compass, and where the team aren't jerks.
The last point has been the most amusing one as I explain these criteria to people. Either they laugh and say of course, you don't need to specify that! Or they nod sagely and say, ah, well, that's a tricky one, jerks are everywhere.
Anyway, it seemed like this was a lot to ask for, so it was lucky that I'm not particularly restricted by sector or by role. I like to experience new fields and working cultures, I'm something of a tech generalist, and in the small, evolving or early stage organisations I'm most familiar with roles are often a fluid thing anyway. I was especially keen to get back to something with a hardware component if possible, and lowRISC is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.
lowRISC works on open source hardware at the silicon layer (and related open source software tools), and so builds on my longstanding interest in open stuff, and particularly the challenges of bringing open to new areas. Open source silicon isn't a totally new idea, but producing products at scale with it is rare. Nonetheless, it's important: openness means greater scope for audit and security; for efficiency (code and hardware designs can be reused, rather than reinventing the wheel), and for flexibility. With Moore's law slowing down, new processors will be more specialised, rather than just smaller and faster. Instead, we'll be designing silicon for more specific applications, and ensuring the designs are efficient and verifiable. Open source hardware makes this much easier - you can get more people working on a design to check it, and you can bolt together open modules for different bits of functionality knowing you understand what is in them (which you can't do with a proprietary processor core which you've licensed - it's just a black box). So open hardware at the silicon level is going to be important for the future of computing.
A core part (that's the sort of pun you can expect more of) of lowRISC's work is with RISC-V, an open computer instruction set architecture. There's a growing global community of companies and universities working with RISC-V and I'm looking forward to meeting many of them at the RISC-V Foundation workshop in Zurich in June.
lowRISC itself is still quite small (but growing), but the team size doesn't reflect the range of people I'll be working with day to day, because there's lots of collaboration going on. Open source ecosystems have different kinds of organisation and activity in them; lowRISC is focussing on providing quality engineering resource and being a hub for collaborative engineering across other partners. (A bit like Linaro does for open source for Arm.) It's a community interest company, meaning a nonprofit dedicated to serving a broader mission not just itself. I'm looking forward to being part of changing how hardware is developed, making it fundamentally more collaborative and factoring in testing and maintenance sensibly. There are some really interesting challenges. For instance, you can't be 100% open right now in silicon, because in an actual manufactured chip there's a lot of analogue components as well as the open source digital bits, and those analogue bits are generally closely linked to the big foundries which manufacture silicon and are secret sauce today. Collaborative engineering should be cost effective and useful to companies, as a way of working on non-differentiating technology components, but it's not always an easy sell or easy to make happen in practice. The same goes for opening up hardware IP - not always a straightforward case to make. How should the governance for this sort of work operate, and how do you make it work in practice? And of course we have the usual startup challenge, that we need to make reliable, high quality products, in a reasonable time, which people actually want and are willing to pay for.
Plus, as per my requirements, the team are lovely. (If this all sounds interesting, we are hiring for multiple positions!)
As the website says (excerpted from various places - it's getting improved as I write):
This may seem an unlikely step for me, on top of a possibly disparate-seeming work history, but fits nicely into responsible delivery of practical systems using emerging technologies, which is how I think of my work. I've been lucky enough to do this in a variety of contexts and with different technologies too.
I'm starting at 4 days a week at lowRISC to ensure I've got some time for a little consultancy work around responsible technology, and to provide cover at the Cambridge Computer Lab until my replacement is in post. I'll also be continuing to noodle around questions of how we fund and organise technology development, including through the Open IP research group, and organising the 2019 Festival of Maintenance. (This year, thanks to my Software Sustainability Institute fellowship, I'll also be building connections with the Maintainers in the US.) But now I'll be able to do this with my own experience as a practitioner to help inform it all too.
The last 18 months have been fascinating and deeply educational, but I've not been doing the sort of work I thrive most in - where I can be part of building things, be that technology products or services or systems.
It's been amazing to see Doteveryone develop, becoming a novel and powerful influence in making the tech sector more responsible. I've been really pleased to help the research I started in 2016 become real products supporting businesses to make good choices around technology, to contribute to our policy work, and to learn so much about the social sector (and what it's like working in a team of mostly women!). Riding the wave of growing hype around "tech ethics" (not to mention data ethics and AI ethics), and trying to stay focussed on how we could make practical change was entertaining.
In early 2018 I became Entrepreneur in Residence at the brand new Trust & Technology Initiative at the University of Cambridge, shaping and establishing the multidisciplinary research network. We've uncovered and connected a lot of incredible work across departments which touches in some way on questions of trust, distrust, the internet, society and power. We've been able to create a distinctive position for Trust & Technology and continue to catalyse new conversations and ideas for how these things might change, or be changed, in the future. I'm delighted to be leaving things in the capable hands of my smart colleague Dr Jennifer Cobbe.
It's been super to be physically based out of the Department of Computer Science and Technology. I was in the same building for much of my PhD studies and some things have changed, and others stayed the same. Mostly though it was lovely to be surrounded by so many incredibly smart people, and to have a chance to catch up with the cutting edge of computer science research, and see what interesting things are about to emerge from academia. This has certainly paid off for me, as lowRISC is a spin-out from the department. In September 2018 I took on a part time interim role at the department, facilitating industrial collaboration. This has updated my understanding of how academic research works these days behind the scenes, and reaffirmed my belief that I'm not an academic.
My quest for my next "building something" project drifted along, and I was starting to think that good opportunities were thin on the ground, and perhaps I should either lower my standards, or settle for my existing portfolio of work. It turns out I'm fussy. I've been looking for jobs which I can do from Cambridge (local or remote - but no tedious commuting), which can pay me fairly, using technology (something deeper than 'digital'), which need my skills, present an interesting challenge, will do something useful in the world, don't trigger my moral compass, and where the team aren't jerks.
The last point has been the most amusing one as I explain these criteria to people. Either they laugh and say of course, you don't need to specify that! Or they nod sagely and say, ah, well, that's a tricky one, jerks are everywhere.
Anyway, it seemed like this was a lot to ask for, so it was lucky that I'm not particularly restricted by sector or by role. I like to experience new fields and working cultures, I'm something of a tech generalist, and in the small, evolving or early stage organisations I'm most familiar with roles are often a fluid thing anyway. I was especially keen to get back to something with a hardware component if possible, and lowRISC is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.
lowRISC works on open source hardware at the silicon layer (and related open source software tools), and so builds on my longstanding interest in open stuff, and particularly the challenges of bringing open to new areas. Open source silicon isn't a totally new idea, but producing products at scale with it is rare. Nonetheless, it's important: openness means greater scope for audit and security; for efficiency (code and hardware designs can be reused, rather than reinventing the wheel), and for flexibility. With Moore's law slowing down, new processors will be more specialised, rather than just smaller and faster. Instead, we'll be designing silicon for more specific applications, and ensuring the designs are efficient and verifiable. Open source hardware makes this much easier - you can get more people working on a design to check it, and you can bolt together open modules for different bits of functionality knowing you understand what is in them (which you can't do with a proprietary processor core which you've licensed - it's just a black box). So open hardware at the silicon level is going to be important for the future of computing.
A core part (that's the sort of pun you can expect more of) of lowRISC's work is with RISC-V, an open computer instruction set architecture. There's a growing global community of companies and universities working with RISC-V and I'm looking forward to meeting many of them at the RISC-V Foundation workshop in Zurich in June.
lowRISC itself is still quite small (but growing), but the team size doesn't reflect the range of people I'll be working with day to day, because there's lots of collaboration going on. Open source ecosystems have different kinds of organisation and activity in them; lowRISC is focussing on providing quality engineering resource and being a hub for collaborative engineering across other partners. (A bit like Linaro does for open source for Arm.) It's a community interest company, meaning a nonprofit dedicated to serving a broader mission not just itself. I'm looking forward to being part of changing how hardware is developed, making it fundamentally more collaborative and factoring in testing and maintenance sensibly. There are some really interesting challenges. For instance, you can't be 100% open right now in silicon, because in an actual manufactured chip there's a lot of analogue components as well as the open source digital bits, and those analogue bits are generally closely linked to the big foundries which manufacture silicon and are secret sauce today. Collaborative engineering should be cost effective and useful to companies, as a way of working on non-differentiating technology components, but it's not always an easy sell or easy to make happen in practice. The same goes for opening up hardware IP - not always a straightforward case to make. How should the governance for this sort of work operate, and how do you make it work in practice? And of course we have the usual startup challenge, that we need to make reliable, high quality products, in a reasonable time, which people actually want and are willing to pay for.
Plus, as per my requirements, the team are lovely. (If this all sounds interesting, we are hiring for multiple positions!)
As the website says (excerpted from various places - it's getting improved as I write):
lowRISC C.I.C. is a not-for-profit company that aims to demonstrate, promote and support the use of open-source hardware - bringing the benefits of open-source to the hardware world. The lowRISC platform aims to be the "Linux of the hardware world", providing a high quality, secure, and open base for derivative designs. We will prove our designs with volume silicon manufacture and accompanying low-cost development boards. Our goal is to lower the barrier of entry to producing custom silicon, establishing a vibrant ecosystem around secure and open hardware designs. Our expertise includes the LLVM Compiler, novel hardware security extensions and RISC-V tools, hardware and processor design.My role is Head of Delivery, meaning I will be coordinating activities, people and things to get all this done. So there's lots to look forward to :)