When Scott’s dad, Aleck, died in 2010 Scott flew to the US for the funeral. After the service Scott and I took some of Aleck’s ashes out to sea from Westport and scattered them over one of his favorite fishing spots. He then spent a few days with us in Port Angeles, Washington.
Although I knew Scott had been working on enhancements to his survey software, the first time I saw one of the more impressive features was when he casually pulled his Nokia cellphone out of his pocket, logged in, and handed it to me. There was an image on the screen that I didn’t immediately identify…Scott casually informed me that it was the track of a survey that was going on at that moment in the North Sea. We were looking at what he called an Executive Overview of the survey data. He then zoomed out to see a larger area, showing more completed tracks, and zoomed way in on interesting points.
This was possible because he had installed a communication app he had written on the computer doing the data processing, and the survey ship had a satellite connection that allowed him to transmit the overview data to a server he had in the cloud. A cellphone app he wrote allowed his phone to communicate with that cloud server. At that time he was the only person who had access to this information.
He had written these apps because his survey hardware and software were being used on more than one ship at a time, and he couldn’t be aboard all of them at the same time. If an operator aboard another ship was having a problem, Scott wanted to be able to zoom in and analyze the data in real time to resolve the problem.
I thought this was amazing, but he said that it was just the start of a new set of programs he was going to write to once again change the way surveys were done. He asked if I would be willing to work with him on this, perhaps doing the testing and writing documentation. That wasn’t a very hard question to answer.
Before Scott headed back to the UK he gave me a list of hardware and software I should have and we agreed to meet on Skype at least several times a week to work on design and implementation of the various components he could imagine.
Scott believed that he could write better code, or perhaps refine it before writing it, if he could verbally describe what he wanted to do to another person. But he was afraid of discussing his code with anyone he thought might want to steal it…which in his mind included just about everyone else he knew. So one of my first roles in what became the SkyRanger project was to be his sounding board. It wasn’t important that I be able to understand the details, or even offer an opinion…I just had to listen and every now and then make a noise to prove that I hadn’t fallen asleep.
Sometimes Scott was communicating from his home or office in the UK, sometimes from aboard a ship doing a survey; as long as he had internet access we chatted a couple times a week…usually for one to two hours each time.
Over the next two years SkyRanger came together as a suite of programs that could be easily customized to suit the needs of individual clients. When Scott was at sea he could run and refine the programs so they were processing real data, allowing him to test and refine the code. When there was a good satellite connection he would upload the overview data so I could follow along and do remote testing and work on the documentation. The one area where I did offer Scott suggestions had to do with the GUI of the end-user apps…the programs I was running. Scott’s idea of an interface was a list of keyboard shortcuts that he had no problem remembering. I pushed for menus and buttons. Ultimately everything had a keyboard shortcut, but some of those shortcuts could be called by a menu or button.
SkyRanger was really coming together toward the end of 2012. The components that were essential for running the survey, communicating the overview, and doing the post-processing on shore were all complete and working well. We had defined several optional enhancements and were considering how to best implement them. Scott and I attended the Oceanology Conference in London to scope out any competition and evaluate possible clients.
Scott’s primary client at the time was GEMS, and we worked closely with several people there on the development. But then, at the end or 2012, GEMS went belly up, owing Scott a lot of money. He was scrambling to recover what he could and SkyRanger was put on the sidelines for a few years.