Eleanor McHugh Interview
Eleanor McHugh takes Jonni through the ups and downs of her eventful working life.
leanor McHugh describes herself as a privacy evangelist and freelance reality consultant. Her “accidental career” has seen her working on avionics, satellite comms, broadcast TV and, latterly, digital identity systems. She’s also a speaker at Ruby and Go conferences. We met her at the O’Reilly Software Architecture conference in October 2017 to find out more.
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Linux Format: You’ve had quite an illustrious career path: trained as a physicist, worked on aircraft systems and are now involved with digital identity management. It’s quite dizzying just thinking about it. Can you tell us a bit more of your story? Eleanor McHugh: It’s a purely accidental career. When I went to university I wanted to go off and build rail guns. LXF: I can sympathise. EMcH: This was in the 1980s and there was huge amounts of money in Star Wars type projects [see Strategic Defense Initiative], and really I wanted to build rail guns and gamma ray lasers. Unfortunately, I spent too much time at uni hacking on computers and not enough time paying attention to electronics lectures. I disastrously ruined my degree the first time and had to resit it. At that stage, the only thing that I was qualified to do as a mainstream job was advise on the safety and control systems of nuclear reactors, which isn’t a particularly broad market. LXF: Hey now, if it’s good enough for Homer Simpson… EMcH: Yes, and I must admit I’ve watched him over the years and thought to myself, “If only”. But I don’t think I could be trusted with that responsibility in the long term. So after a couple of years of doing the kind of stuff you do when you finish uni and haven’t got anything to do, I figured that I’d spent all of my life playing around with computers anyway – I’ve been coding since I was about 11 – so I thought, “Why don’t I do that? How difficult can it be to earn a living as a programmer? They’d be paying me to do what I love.” Except that’s not really how it turned out. I drifted through an MSc, and then by
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accident a friend was working on aircraft control systems. He invited me to do a very short project for three months that would’ve paid for my MSc. I needed a dissertation topic and I needed the money, and he insisted it would only be three months. So two and a half years later when I finally got out of that particular field I was a burnt-out wreck. Yet I had created something that I’m still incredibly proud of, but which shouldn’t exist: a cockpit navigation system written in Visual Basic 5.
Then I was sucked into this weird project by a friend. He was the CTO of an ISP based up in Camden – it was the only certified ISP that could do DNS registration. Because he was my best friend’s fiancé she bullied me into going to a project for him because he needed some work doing and couldn’t really afford it and I would do it on the cheap. Friends… they don’t care about your mortgage. He jumped ship from there because he got this brilliant offer to CTO another project
on wanting to join the arms race… “This was in the 1980s and there was huge amounts of money in Strategic Defense Initiative-type projects, and really I wanted to build rail guns and gamma ray lasers” LXF: I am at once impressed and terrified. EMcH: It was certified for use in emergency service helicopters in Derbyshire, Durham and Strathclyde. Real lives being saved by this damned thing I made. As I say, I emerged from that a burnt-out wreck. I think a lot of people’s first programming job was like this: working stupid hours, not sure what you should say no to. So I drifted through a couple of projects with a team doing satellite communications, then over into real-time broadcast control networks for television. I got burnt out on that, too: four years of dealing with a client who was very, er, special left me not wanting to deal with people any more. I think I went for about seven months without speaking to anyone.
with another company. I was left behind with this thing, they just sold the company, and the people that bought it didn’t want to build it. I didn’t really want to build it either. But they did want to keep paying me for three months so that they at least had the option to build it. In that time he put together this team to work on something called dotTel. The idea was that ICANN wanted to prove DNS that could be used for more than just looking up machines. So it was really the start of the whole move toward novelty domains. I think at the time they were called sponsored gTLDs. And it was a totally mad project, because what they really wanted to do was take a global address book system, which they wanted to implement as an
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