The Code Less Travelled

Jonni Bidwell hadnevertalked toanyonewhoprogrammed BASICforhelicopters.UntilhemetEleanor McHugh

Eleanor 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.

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…