I’ve spent an entire career in the world of Information Technology working across many sectors for numerous companies large and small. I’ve provided mentoring to numerous startups and now act as an independent consultant and advisor. I feel reasonably well qualified therefore to make a few observations about IT. In particular, one that REALLY WINDS ME UP.

What is it? You wonder. Well, read on……

When I wrote my first computer program (showing my age here) it was written in Assembler on an RML380Z. There may be a few in museums now but these were amazing 8-bit, Z80-based, machines with 16Kb of programmable memory. Yes, 16 KILO bytes. This taught you to code efficiently. Very efficiently. So, what did you do if you had a feature that you needed to run several times? Well, you coded it once and built the code to call it as a procedure or a sub-routine. There you go, my first experience of what “reusability” meant. At that time however there was no way to share each other’s code as it was considered cheating.

When I progressed to college I learned to program on VAX/VMS and DEC-10 (go Google them!). Again, didn’t have lots of memory so you would build procedures and call them as needed. For interpreted languages that worked fine as you could see what was happening and, revelation time, you could share code snippets with each other. (Disclaimer: In college, using each other’s work is called plagiarism. However, if it’s code you attribute to someone, it’s reusability….How cool is that!).

With college over I progressed on to working in the commercial sector where I learned lots about the retail industry and data analytics (hey, I was doing “Big Data” before it was a faddy term!). I also started to use compiled languages which introduced further validation about reusing code. If you write something, it compiles and it works, you can then use it as part of a library of procedures or services that could be called as and when needed. Apparently I was designing and using stuff that we now call “Service Oriented Architecture”. Many years later I still hear that SOA will soon be big. One day.

Fast forward twenty years and I started mentoring startups and attended loads of “pitch night” events in the FinTech arena. Wow, the number of times I saw someone developing something new / innovative / ground breaking / unique ….that I’d seen someone else pitching a week/day/hour before ? I lost count. “We’ve identified a unique and ground-breaking opportunity in the market” and “we’ve just developed something that the team round the corner has built” became synonymous. Samey, samey, gamey, gamey…Why couldn’t they all work it out together and build it once? Even better, why not design a solution that builds a solution for you? H’mmmm….

So, what winds me up? …..We’ve gone from an inability to share/reuse, then technology has matured an enabled us to code share, use common libraries, reuse procedures, functions, etc. and then as startup organisations we’ve elected to not exploit ideas to code and design with reuse and instead build it from scratch. Every time. Making the same mistakes that everyone else on the journey has already made. We’re determined to build our own wheel.

Then, the B-word arrived. Not Brexit, but BLOCKCHAIN. Yay!, here’s a whole new paradigm that doesn’t need designing, development, change management, testing, version control….oh, hang on it does. So we start seeing people developing all of these capabilities from scratch. Ho hum, here we go again. Everyone is trying to build the wheel. Again. Hasn’t someone built one of those already?

Then the C-word appeared….yes, cover your ears, it’s CRYPTOCURRENCIES from which the latest acronym of ICO or TGE was born….Yes Initial Coin Offering / Token Generating Event And guess what? Through a blend of multiple blockchains, protocol forks and smart contracts everyone seems to be building their own cryptocurrencies, running their own ICO’s and creating their own tokens from scratch. Arrgghhh! Why does everyone want to code their own token, with the implicit overhead of testing, checking, validating, deploying, etc. when that could all be standardized?

This frustration leads me to a happy place though. Turns out that some other people have been thinking the same. Why not develop an ecosystem that allows tokens to be created, without the need to individually code them? Awesome! That’s what led to me having a conversation with Simple Token (https://simpletoken.org/) CEO Jason Goldberg. He described the thinking, the rationale and the journey that he and the team have been on. And I get it! It’s so neatly described on the website strap-line: “Simple Token enables any business to launch a branded cryptocurrency on open Ethereum sidechains”. That’s the ultimate in reusability and advanced common sense. That’s why I was delighted to accept the opportunity to become an advisor (due disclosure here).

Check their website out for more details. If you’re looking to invest in the forthcoming token sale read the documents they’ve produced: https://simpletoken.org/documents . Token sale starts 14 November and there’s early access opportunities and a very active telegram channel at https://www.t.me/simpletoken . Even if you’re not looking to invest, check them out because the concept is simple (although the capability is comprehensive) and, to those of us who believe in not reinventing the wheel, eminently sensible. Enjoy!