UCL People - Switched on

Ronnie Barker’s been building software programmes since he was 13, today he’s still pushing buttons; it’s just that they’re somewhat bigger. Connect meets the man behind the Millennium London Eye laser show and finds out what it means to develop a communications system for the European Space Agency (ESA)…

Ronnie Barker (BSC Computer Science) shares much more than a name with a comedy legend even though he readily admits: “It’s handy in business because everyone remembers me”. Behind this name is an astute brain that is constantly crafting solutions to clients’ software problems. It is one that’s been taking things apart and rebuilding them for different companies with different sets of needs for almost 15 years. And one that’s programmed, amongst other things, the millennium eve London Eye laser show and the communications system for ESA’s German control room.

“I suppose the eye is my most famous work, on the 1st January the picture of the wheel with all the lasers coming through it was on the front page of a lot of the UK papers.”

At the time Ronnie was working for his brother-in-law’s company and it becomes clear that his family has remained a consistent thread throughout his career: “I see that time working with my brother in law as quite defining in my entrepreneurship; I got opportunities and was put into situations that I wouldn’t have gone into normally. The company had a long history of employing family and we had to perform and work much longer hours but that dynamism was good and I do have to attribute a lot of my good traits to working there.”

Ronnie was somewhat of a teenage star in the software world: he sold his first product at 13 and then re-wrote it and sold it back to the same company at 16.

“My father helped me: a friend of his down the road, an estate agent, needed something because there wasn’t an application on the market. He basically sent me down there and I sat in their office and learnt what they wanted and programmed their system.”

He makes it all sound quite inconsequential but behind the humble exterior is an integrity that is evident from the moment we meet. I have a suspicion that it’s this focus on people and relationships that is part of his success:

“I believe in developing the relationship with the customer more than the particular project. It’s really a moral thing - it’s about trust and it also means I can sleep at night.”

Ronnie believes that by empowering the client to drive and steer the project he’s offering something unique, something that, as he learnt from his experience working on other projects, contracts don’t allow for.

“Everybody thinks what I do is scientific when it’s actually creative - the biggest part is understanding what the customer needs. Quite a lot of software used to be built in layers with the user interface on the end. I’m passionate about doing things in a vertical stripe so our clients can see something usable right at the beginning.”

Perhaps Ronnie’s somewhat special approach to his business stems from his UCL experience which was slightly different too. By his own admission he didn’t do the ‘typical student’s thing’. Instead he lived at home and spent two hours travelling from the top of the northern line coming in from his parents’ every day but it offered opportunities to read. “I actually enjoyed the travelling in and out and I still do that now living in Cambridge and it’s great because I’m getting through a lot of books.”

Now Ronnie is returning to UCL through the Biz Spark programme, a scheme that helps young start ups to source sponsorship. He has recently teamed up with an ex-colleague to start a software engineering firm called The Agile Workshop. So would he consider recruiting UCL graduates as part of that?

“Yes definitely. I think employing graduates is a very important way to bring people into industry. Some of the things I’ve done have been quite leading edge and I’d like to make sure that some of those things are being taught in universities.”

“I feel like now is the time in my life when I want to turn back and rekindle that UCL connection. I’m certainly proud to put UCL on my CV. I read a book recently about the marine corps and the one part I remember was that they don’t see themselves as ex-marines – they just have that mantra ‘once a marine always a marine’ and I think it’s similar with UCL. I’ve met people who went to UCL at a completely different time doing a different subject and despite that we can find a connection.”