Starting at Seeq

Short post, because I mostly just want it written down somewhere.

I am starting at Seeq. I will be on the data connectivity side — the work of reaching out to whatever system a plant has actually been running since 2004 and getting its history into a shape the rest of the product can use.

If you have never worked in industrial data, that sounds like plumbing. It is plumbing. I love plumbing, and this is why this particular plumbing is worth caring about.

Somewhere there is a real heat exchanger with a real temperature, and at 03:14 on a Tuesday in 2019 it did something nobody expected. The only surviving witness is a compressed series of floats with a quality flag on each one. At the other end of that series is a process engineer with a plant behaving strangely, a production meeting in ninety minutes, and a completely reasonable expectation that the numbers in front of them correspond to reality.

Everything I build sits between those two — a physical thing that genuinely happened, and a person who needs to know about it right now. The entire job is to carry it across without distorting it. I find that enormously motivating. There is a version of software work where you are optimising a number that exists only because somebody decided to measure it. This is not that. There is a heat exchanger. It had a spiking temperature. Someone needs to know.

More once I have something worth saying. For now: genuinely, unreasonably pleased to be here.