My name is Richard Rodger.

I own a software company: Ricebridge. I make components for developers. That means I care about stuff like proper documentation and testing. I also care about user-friendly API design. Components should be easy-to-use so that developers can just get on with things.

How'd I end up doing this? I started off in a great little webshop called Internet Business Ireland (now sadly deceased), and cut my teeth on Perl and stuff like that. I majored in Maths and Philosophy, so programming is sort of an acquired taste for me. After IBI I decided to give up on programming after 1am.

I also spent a bit of time in Germany with InterComponentWare, which was a proper startup - lot's fun and very hard work, but I learnt a whole bunch of grown-up management stuff. After InterComponentWare, I only coded until 11pm.

Then I worked for a Bank. A whole different world and a world that needs a whole lot of help. We suffered from some terrible third party code (Ricebridge is all about doing something about that). At the bank I was only allowed to code for 2 hours a day, before lunch.

I've worked in some other places and did a whole bunch of freelance stuff for Speech-Writers (getting married? check 'em out!), learnt Java along the way, and got kinda excited about all this Agile stuff (I've since given up on hours and replaced them with iterations... :).

By the time I got back to Ireland (a great place to start a company by the way), I just had to try my own thing. So here I am. Yeah, I should have started this blog sooner, but if you stick around, I'll give you the inside story: How to start a software company, without really trying...