Kenneth McHugh

Ken started out in Ireland playing with his first Vic 20 at 4 years old. He got into programming at around 9 years old learning qbasic on a Commodore 64. Soon after that, he emigrated to Canada where he continued to expand his knowledge of programming and also became involved with the Canadian Armed Forces. At 16 he joined the Canadian Argylls as a reservist infantryman. Using the income from the reserves Sheridan college for Computer Programming, and also managed to learn other interesting skills such as reconnaissance patrolling and machine gunner. Ken also taught multiple recruit courses and courses on various weapons systems whilst in the reserves. After completing college he landed his first job with a laundry company, Coinamatic, writing coin counting software. The software was eventually used to also monitor, count, and sort, all of the coins going through all the parking meters in the city of Toronto. Initially taking on VB6 and Foxpro, Ken brought OOP to the systems by converting to .Net. It was through the support of the amazing team in Coinamatic where Ken realised that he thought differently to most and enjoyed solving problems at the abstract level rather than looking at a problem at face value. This started a run of consulting that had Ken working across Canada, the US, and the UK on problems ranging from Inventory Control Auction Systems for cruise ships to Print Systems for Oxford University Press, and sensitive data migrations for the NSPCC. It was in the UK where Ken completed his masters in computing (Software Engineering) and met up with a number of like minded individuals working in Knowledge Management, Data Capture, and Data Analysis problems across many domains. Extremely interesting problems which ranged from Community Consultation, IED detection systems, and tracing the source of extremism across specific populations. It was this work that also brought Ken to Singapore to help set up a development team and platform to be used by Cognitive Edge to deliver their Cynefin Framework. Once the team was stabilised and the platform up and running, Ken tried his hand at relaxing by building a product, YouCommentate, which while being targeted at sports fans, was intended for bigger things. The 18 months of building what was essentially a real time peer to peer internet radio station allowing consumers to choose their style of commentary over television sports programming was either too soon for it's time, or not a good idea. It was then that Ken joined Tigerspike and worked his way from Technical Director to CPO focusing on building platforms, processes, and products, to enable exponential scale in a services business that would normally see a linear scaling correlated to the number of individuals in the business.