We are fortunate enough to be joined in the Akcela incubator by Dom Davis. In this episode we talk about a history of coding, a time where coders weren’t in demand, how hard questions have hard answers and all the reasons we love Norfolk. You can listen to the podcast here, or review the lightly edited, speech to text transcript below
Podcast and Transcript: Dom Davis on Coding, Startups and Living in Norfolk
James:
Welcome to the Akcela Podcast. As always, I’m your host, your guide, your cofounder finding their way on this podcast journey of Discovery together. James Adams I’m absolutely delighted to be joined by tech evangelist, teacher, mentor, trainer, and to be honest, all-round good guy. Mr. Dom Davis.
Dom is a developer, an international speaker, an active member of the Norfolk technology scene, a veteran of investment banking in the city and a casualty of the financial crisis, Dom has been writing code since his childhood sometime in the last Millennium, and in his own words, as humble as ever, he hopes someday to become good. Today, Dom and I will be chatting about never really knowing code where to start when you are starting up and what he sees as a future in tech. So without further Ado, let’s welcome Mr. Dom Davis.
Dom, how are you doing today?
Dom:
I’m all right. That was an amazing introduction. It’s almost like I wrote it myself.
James:
Dom, we always joke about the fact that I am not a developer.Can you just give us a brief overview of your history in code? Not in the style of interperative dance, becasuse it’s a podcast.
Dom:
Yes. So many moons ago I started with the BBC Micro Model B.
I was typing in one of the games on the user manual. And in those days, code was more about writing the description of the games. You had these magazines where you got a game in 1 KB and there would be this fantastic picture and this fantastic description of what the game was going to do. And you Typed it in and it was rubbish. This was like seven pages of Moon Lander with graphics and numbers. You have to type in for data and I Typed it all in and it didn’t work.
And this was before we had the Internet and stack overflow and I was eleven. It took me three years to work out why it wasn’t working, but by that point, I could kind of program and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a lot.
James:
So this is a magazine that actually just has the code laid out for you or there was some learning experience.
Dom:
No, here is the code. You type the code in off you go. So this is the BBC User Guide. If you have one, you will remember it. Well, the magazines themselves would have slight alterations depending on whether you’re typing and what is that to expect from or a C 64 or BBC or an Acorn or different types of platform that you have. So it became very obvious at that point that I wanted to become a software developer. So I then focused on, well, not my school work because I went to go fail my animals and failed my degree. But we’ll also have that a bit. Thankfully, a friend of mine went to Cambridge, managed to get himself a decent job in an investment bank and got me a job through effectively the back door. So I came in via that level.
James:
You said you’ve been sort of coding on essentially Homebrew computers. Have you progressed any further than that? If you’re getting into investment banking, you’re probably coding a bit more efficient. Or was it not coding?
Dom:
No. I only just moved off my original computer. I remember de0fragging my hard drive with 512 megabytes of data. I’m thinking, how am I ever going to fill that up? It’s scary how many terabytes I have these days. But actually what my friend needed was someone who could learn who had some basic understanding of stuff and go and work on support on this proprietary system. So they weren’t going to find someone with the skills they needed off the bat because they were going to have to learn about this proprietary system. And because he was already in, he was able to guide me through the process. I think it’s probably the way to describe it. So I got my first job through Nepotism.
James:
As all the best jobs are. (Laughing).
Dom:
I wanted to do the programming side, and I managed then to work my way from the support team to the development team, and that I think I managed to do off my own back. So I started programming in Java. I could do some stuff in TCL. But then I moved on to Java, and that’s where I became a, quote, unquote professional programmer. And over the course of 13 years, I became better at it. It’s probably the best way to describe it. And then the financial crisis happened.
James:
I’ve heard about that.
Dom:
Yes, I was working on some risk systems at the time. Turns out we didn’t need the risk systems. We just needed a large paper with the word VERY written on it. I was working for a large Swiss investment bank that got the memo late, so they were still buying some of these instruments when everyone else was divesting them. And I was invited to seek opportunities in alternative industry. So I think it’s the best way to put it as many were as many were. So I ended up in advertising.
James:
This must have been a massively different world than it is today because the thought of a developer coming, one available, but two also being invited to seek opportunities elsewhere in today’s world just doesn’t happen. If you’re a developer and you’re out of work, me and you both watch Silicon Valley and laugh about it quite a bit. But if you’re available now, you’re almost being courted. They’re sending you stuff.
Dom:
At the time, that wasn’t the case at the time, there were loads of people who had just been let go from investment banking, so it was a buyer’s market. The financial crisis was unfolding, so a lot of companies were unfortunately folding, and there were not as many jobs as one might have liked. So I had enough to keep me going for a year. I got scared after four months and another friend of mine said that they were looking for experienced developers to come in and help effectively transition a company from being a medium sized company to be a large company. And they were going through that phase change. So they had an interim CTO in. I remember going into my interview, I’ve been asked a particularly nasty question on sequel, which I wasn’t great at, and then having a discussion about World of Warcraft, and I turned around and said, Look, I’m happy to have a discussion about World of Warcraft. I played a lot of World of Warcraft, but if they wanted me to do this sequel question on the board, could they please shut up? And that was my exact words. I got the job because I told them to shut up. They wanted someone who was going to actually challenge the status quo. And it was kind of doing that job that I realised that I had learnt some things about programming. We had some very senior developers who were blinkered, this probably the best way to put it and having to challenge their assumptions and their way of doing things and moving stuff forward. I then moved up to Norfolk for love.
James:
The reason I stayed, to be honest.
Dom:
So I moved up. I met someone. I started working in Virgin Wines, and again, it was this thing of helping transition the technology from something that was not necessarily that great, great business, but ailing technology and improving that so the business could expand. Yes, that was my Java career. And then I went into startups.
James:
So before we go on to starts, which is obviously something that really does interest me, for obvious reasons. When we’ve talked about code previously, we talk about learning the fundamentals and then moving on to almost proficiency. And I guess for anyone starting up, what would you say about the fact of not feeling you have to be proficient in every code base straight off the bat, because that’s something when you say you’ve dabbled now in a lot of different languages. I think there’s an expectation of people always that they should go into something and be full of knowledge straight off the bat. It doesn’t work like that, does it?
Dom:
One of the people I worked with at Virgin Wines would come in almost every single day and hand us a link and say, you suck at JavaScript or you suck at CSS. And you would find out that some seven-year-old had implemented the whole of Windows three, one, one in pure CSS running on the browser and you would just look at it and go, that wouldn’t pass code review. That’s the only thing I can say is it wouldn’t pass code review. Why am I even doing this job? It is just so vast that you can never know all of it. You can’t even know a tiny fraction. So I tend to work on the premise that get comfortable with the bits that you use and then use all the tools that you have available to you. Stack overflow is out there. Google is out there. I spend a lot of my life searching for how do I do this? How do I do that? Thank you very much. The difference between a junior developer and a senior, more experienced developer is that the more experienced developer knows where to go and look for those answers and how to piece them together. And the senior developer will be looking how not to write the code in the first place because code is overhead. So yeah, if you are starting out from brand new, then I would say play, don’t worry about making something perfect. Just make something fun. Go get around, play with something and mess around with one of those do some kind of fun project. My first projects were basically just small little projects for laughs. I’ve done Planck Services, which was the logical extension from Microservices, and the idea being that it becomes orchestration, not code. You just fire up a few billion of these services and they can do anything you want, albeit very slowly, at huge expense. But again, it was one of those things that was just like I wanted to play with Web services. If you are an experienced developer, you’ve got the sort of the ideas and the tool sets and the algorithms and everything from your existing languages. So go and play and work out how to change your dialect effectively to what it is that you want to learn and don’t ever stop learning.
James:
I think that’s the key, though, in any walk of life or your career. And I think that’s how many people fall out of love with what they’re doing is they do stop experimenting. They do stop learning. And I think it’s a very dangerous place to be when you get to that point, either because you’ve fallen out of love with what you’re doing or you can’t be bought anymore.
Dom:
Yeah, the industry moves so fast that there’s always new and shiny stuff to learn, and you want to be making sure that you’re doing things that interest you and things that drive you. There’s nothing worse than slogging through a code base thinking, Why am I doing this? Your creative juice, it just can’t flow and you’re not doing your job properly. Whereas if you’re looking at something and you’re excited about it, like, how do I solve this problem? You’re going to do a much better job.
James:
So you’ve been involved in a lot of startups. I say a lot of stuff you’ve been involved in the startup scene, and again, I know we’ve had separate chats about falling out of planes, et cetera. What’s the one piece of advice you could give to someone from a coding perspective, but also, I think really just from a general startup perspective, because when you are starting up, it doesn’t matter what you do. You kind of do a bit of everything. What advice would you give to people who are now starting up a business?
Dom:
Talk to people. It’s the number one piece of advice. Talk to people about what you’re doing, explain it to them, find out what their reaction is. Talk to people about how they might go about doing something. You may find that you are working on a problem that has aspects that have been solved. So go use those. Don’t reinvent the wheel. You may find out that someone else is doing something similar so you can go investigate what they’re doing and maybe borrow some ideas. There’s all kinds of stuff out there. The temptation is for the startup is to sort of go and do the whole crunch time. You go buy your 7000 packs of Ramen noodles, lock yourself in a room, head down, blinkered and write your code, and hopefully come up with the middle out compression algorithm.
You will go away. You will write something. It will be rubbish. It will not match the product market fit. You’ll take it out to market. Everyone will laugh at you and you will need to pivot. And all startups go through this. You look at some of the big names like Flickr and Discord and various other things were not what they set out to be. There was a messaging device for the game they were trying to build, right. So they were building slack. I think. I think that was Discord rather than it was, but it was one of the messages. So yeah, essentially, they were building a game, and actually they ended up building this messaging. We’re like, no, this is actually the future. Yeah. They took the messaging component, from which is why Discord has Guild in part of the API. So it was a massive pivot. And this builders are a successful company that they’re doing well. So, yeah, go and speak to people. And don’t worry about what the responses are either. You don’t have to take what everyone says as gospel.
I’ve been through the Techstars accelerator, where they put you in front of 100 mentors in the space of two weeks and you explain your business and they deconstruct it and give you advice. And 50% of us were saying we should concentrate on the vertical and 50% were saying that we should concentrate on horizontal. And I came out thinking that we should be concentrating on some kind of 45 degree horizontal vertical slope.
James:
I think you said it because obviously you’ve written on your time in Techstars, and if anyone hasn’t, we’ll put a link in the description of this podcast. Go and read it. It’s my recommendation, but your way of reviewing and almost becoming comfortable with the fact that you’re getting a different view or spectrum of answers is. Difficult questions have difficult answers.
Dom:
Yes. And there isn’t necessarily one answer to one question. Absolutely. I mean, there’s a million more ways to skin a cat. Obviously, you’ve got to ask yourself, why are you skinning cats in the first place? Different difficult questions. So yes, there’s loads of different ways to do things. And there’s no just look at the whole sort of Slack discord Microsoft Teams, Skype in the messaging space. It’s not like any one of those is the answer.
James:
Although I think you would say to me that Microsoft Teams is not the answer.
Dom:
Microsoft Teams is definitely the one way of doing that.
It does serve a purpose mainly to annoy me. But you’re looking at Slack has filled the kind of business startup in niche. Teams has filled the enterprise niche, and discord has filled the sort of the more gamery niche and Skype seemed to have squandered the opportunity of lockdown quite well. That’s just one particular area where you’ve got all of these different answers and you start having to ask the question what audience we are going after. If you try to go after all of those audiences and be all things to all people, I think you would fail.
James:
I jokingly called it super niching the other day, some of my colleagues are still taking a look at me, but yeah, pick your niche. So just because we wanted to keep this to a fairly succinct podcast and I think we’ll definitely get you back on to explore a lot more things in the future, because by the way, that last answer to one piece of advice, it was superb. I completely agree. No one’s going to know what you’re doing unless you tell people what you’re doing and no one’s going to give you any feedback unless you ask exactly that. But from your history and your love affair, I guess with Tech, what excites you the most in the emerging tech space?
Dom:
Everything. Quite literally everything.
So we’ve had VR become a thing. We’ve got the Metaverse becoming more of a thing depending on how you define Metaverse. I can see there being a sort of conjoining of gaming VR Metaverse stuff that looks very cool. There’s the shakeup of the finance space. I think it’s Alan Kelly who said the big banks are dead. They just don’t know it yet. And large organizations take a long time to die. But finance has been shaken up with the contender banks. We’re looking at currency from a fundamental. Is this what we should be using type viewpoint now with Cryptocurrencies? And I think we will see huge plays come out of that space. Hardware is just getting better and better and better and better and better. And it’s fantastic. So yeah, everything is just all fun.
James:
You and I talk a lot as well. You know, my leaning certainly into more and more so the Web3 spaces, and I think it’s really interesting that even in that space, you can be super passionate about the whole VR Metaverse play. And to be honest, for me, that doesn’t excite me the whole idea of decentralised finance, but also even down to the point of challenger banks and looking at how we even through what I call standard financing models, tech has certainly changed that up. And even things like maybe not decentralised finance on a crypto viewpoint. But decentralised finance in terms of crowdfunding et cetera, et cetera. I have my own issues with that as a model. Personally. But we can’t say it doesn’t exist because it does, and it has changed the game. If you look at seed investment or SEIS investment.
Dom:
I’m a Seedrs investor in some kind of crowdfunding investors on some other things. Patreon, I pay for creators to do niche stuff. I love the fact that I go onto YouTube and watch the most bizarre “superniched” content. I quite enjoyed Lord of the Rings, but not as much as some people out there. And I can go watch episodes on why it was the Gandalf couldn’t take the ring or why the Eagles couldn’t take the ring because you’ve got some very, very knowledgeable people who have spent their time to go work this stuff out and write it up and produce an episode for me to wash. I mean, yeah, I’ll shove them a couple of dollars to say thank you very much. It’s great. So as far as I’m concerned, television is almost dead.
James:
Which is quite interesting in the upcoming BBC license license debate.So we’ll see what that one goes. Yeah, it’s all very exciting. So last question, Dom, thanks so much for your time, but we will get you back on for another episode because I’m sure there’s going to be some deep dives in the future. We haven’t even touched on the fact that you are Mr. AI, which I know you’re not, but always seems to be a label. We’re obviously a Norwich based incubator, and that in itself is a bit of an oddity. What is it that you love about Norfolk?
Dom:
I live in North Norfolk, so I live in Cromer on the coast and I have within walking distance, Woodlands, beach fields, parks, skate park places for my kids to go cycle all within walking distance. I can afford a house here, a large house with a garden. For those of you listing in London, that’s a green thing at the back of your property and it’s a much slower pace of life. I’d like it here. I’ve lived in London. I enjoy London, but it is very all in now. I have children. My priority is what I want for a living space has drastically changed and this is the perfect place to bring them up.
James:
Norfolk is aesthetically pleasing and financially affordable.
Dom:
Yeah.
James:
Dom thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come in and chat today. I know that we’ve got some other meetings and things lined up now, so we chatted some more, but we will definitely get another podcast. I’m sure. Excellent. I’m sure the listeners will want to with some better recording gear. We won’t get into that on the podcast. I just wanted to say thank you ever so much for the sponsors of accelerating the incubator to Fuel Studios. Ashton’s Legal, Farnell-Clark and Mad HR and thank you to your sales for tuning in. Listening. Anything we missed, any comments, any feedback or anything on the discussions we’ve had today. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time. Bye.