THE 2025 FUEL CRISIS AND THE END OF BIG OIL...

So I'm on a train on my way down to Cumbernauld for the weekend. I have Jamie (age 9) with me and he is delighted to be on a train. It's diesel-electric. Onboarding I pointed out the massive turbo on the side of the train just below the level of the platform. (I'm an engineer, I notice these things...)

The Diesel engine powers a generator to make electric energy to turn a massive induction motor that makes it move, I tell Jamie.

It's quiet, but you can just hear the engine's dull drone as we fly through the countryside. I'm guessing being diesel-electric it is more efficient than pure diesel and also cleaner.

I was also on a bus this morning on the way to work. It was one of Aberdeen's new hydrogen-powered fleet. Diesel buses have been abandoned in favour of turning hydrogen into electricity which again powers a motor to make the bus move. This bus is almost silent apart from some transmission noise on the move. When stopped there is no noise at all. Great for commuters like me tapping on my iPhone and writing my blog.

I like both these forms of transport in terms of where we are with the tech. I am however a massive car fan… a petrolhead at heart and I feel a sense of gloom coming.

I like my petrol and Diesel engines. I have a few cars. All of them are older. A big 4x4 with a Diesel engine in it. I love the torque and the feeling of going anywhere it gives, and it's 500 miles or so range. I have a Lotus seven kit car with a revy 16v Toyota engine that makes it fly. I also have an Abarth 500 which has a little 1.4-litre turbocharged engine. It's got twin intercoolers and one of my favourite exhaust notes of any car I have owned.

 

I have promised the Abarth to Jamie when he is old enough to drive.

Jamie is 9, and he will not be able to drive till he is 17. That's in 8 years time. With care and regular servicing, little Abarth should still be in good health when he is ready. It's quite easy. I have had many cars that were over 10 years old and had higher miles on them. The Abarth is a modern car and the build quality and corrosion protection are really good.

The big problem as I see it is, will petrol and diesel cars still be on the road in 2025? In only eight years' time.

I read an article while having my lunch today, which was a report by Stanford University that are predicting that fossil fuel cars will vanish in less than EIGHT years time! The report suggests as electric cars become cheaper, 'Big Oil' and the petroleum industry will collapse. People will have no choice but to invest in electric cars. Electric cars will become cheaper, more reliable and travel further.

It painted a picture of petrol and diesel cars being abandoned. No longer being economical to run. Petrol stations would close and become increasingly difficult to find. Spare parts would stop being made. Garages will no longer repair the current generation of cars. The falling oil price is predicted to get lower.

So it may be game over for the little Abarth and my 4x4. Eight years does not seem that far away. What's their fate in years to come, abandoned, in the 2025 fuel crisis.

For my Lotus Seven kit car, I'm not so worried. I built it after all. As technology changes who knows I could replace the petrol engine with a dirty great big electric motor (dirty?) and some modern batteries. Possibly both were donated by a crash-damaged modern electric car. The performance could be better than the current petrol engine.

My kit car has a simple 12-volt electric system with a separate wire harness for the engine. So to remove the petrol engine and its ECU would be easy. It would leave big holes where the engine, gearbox and petrol tank lived. These can be replaced by the Motor its ECU, and batteries or fuel cell. Who knows I may be able to put a motor per wheel and make it four-wheel drive. That would be fun.

All the other electric systems would remain unchanged. There is no antilock brakes or traction control. It's really only lights and a horn left when the engines are gone.


 

It should be lighter too if I could get a range of 200 or so miles that would be ideal. It doesn't go much further on a tank of petrol at the moment. It's not very comfortable for long distances so the majority of driving I do is just a quick blast at evenings and weekends.

So 2025, here's hoping Jamie gets some use out of the Abarth before we need to abandon it at the side of the road.

I also need to get my finger out as I have dreams and promises of building a hot rod project with the boys when they get older. Nothing fancy. Something rat-looking with old black faded paint, a small noisy engine, no mod cons, and flames up the side. Fingers crossed.

(edited, The Abarth may have some reprieve, found this great article on an electric rally car... Hmmm 460 bhp?)

THE YEAR I TOOK BACK CONTROL...

Last week CodeClan contacted me and asked if I would write them an article for their website. Of course, I would be delighted to. Apparently, someone had been in touch and was looking to change careers, they hated their job and would like to study coding. However, they thought at 46 they were too old. Well I am 46 (old?) and I did it (I actually started at CodeClan when I was 45, but that's splitting hairs)

So almost a year ago my work life took a turn for the worse and came crashing down. My "position was put at risk". Redundancy was inevitable. I was caught up in a failing Oil and Gas industry, failing department, and failing management.

With some dubious ethics, I was forced into a no-win situation, and I walked out. (Silence....)

There I was 46, had a wife and kids to support, had a poor job market (Aberdeen), and had lots of free time. I was tired of having busted a gut for the same company for the past 22. I needed a change.

A few chance meetings and a conversation led me to look up CodeClan. A small education facility in Edinburgh offering a software coding boot camp. It sounded interesting. I'd heard about boot camps, it's all about coding, pizza, and table tennis.

The CodeClan course was 16 weeks of full-time study and when (if) you finish you will have a new qualification in software development. A chance for me to get out of Oil and Gas, change an industry and get into Tech.

 

I love Tech, and 30 years ago I learned some coding at university (Pascal and assembly language) as part of my BEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. However, I have never had any proper code training. Things have moved on a lot. Being able to retrain would great and possibly a chance for a rest (I wish!).

I applied and was asked down for an interview at the CodeClan office in Edinburgh. I found a super friendly bunch of people, a real buzz, and the atmosphere was exciting. There were discussions of employee partners doing new things with code. As I looked about I could imagine I was in Silicon Valley.

I was offered a place in cohort 7 and I was lucky to be granted funding from the Transition Training Fund (woohoo! Go me). This is a fund set up to help oil and gas workers retrain having been made redundant. That's me so I applied. It paid for the bulk of my course fees.

I discussed it with my family if they would survive without me during the week for the next 16. Happily, we all agreed, and if there was a chance to improve my prospects in Aberdeen why not.

So I accepted the place and my start date was set at a few months away. I had the whole summer school holidays with my boys to enjoy first (how many people can do that?).

 

Of course, summer rushed by, and before I knew it I was on a train to Edinburgh to meet the rest of my cohort and pick up my Mac Book Pro (you get one to borrow for the duration of the course). There I met 20 other cohorts all eager to get started. It was a half-day warmup session to make sure your Mac is working and meet each other. Back on the train home, I had my first chance to work on the 3 weeks of homework before the real start (that takes the course to 19 weeks in total, plus I had two two-week breaks at Christmas... So I guess it was 21 weeks for us).

The three weeks whizzed by and I was back down to Edinburgh to start for real. This time I was a commuter, up at 4am on a Monday morning, driving or train to Edinburgh and heading home to Aberdeen on a Friday afternoon. It was hard. I stayed with friends, some weeks in Edinburgh and some weeks in Stirling. I was now a student so keeping costs down was super important, I had no income.

I met up again with my cohorts and we had a day of induction and team building before we were thrown headlong into code.

16 weeks of intense study took over my life. I had to eat sleep and breathe code. The commuting was a pain but I got comfortable in my new routine.

Coding is also hard! It's mentally exhausting. It's a journey of peaks and troughs. Peaks when you spend ages trying to get something working and it finally clicks. Troughs when you spend ages trying to get something working.

But I gradually became familiar with the format of the boot camp and coding became easier.

Lectures and code along in the morning then paired programming in the afternoon, and finally the joy of joys more coding as homework. Thursday nights were a chance to cry into your beer with your cohorts or to discuss how brilliant your code was. Thursday night was social night and homework-free.

The rest is a bit of a blur and thankfully I did a weekly blog (encouraged by CodeClan) to record my time -->

Week 1 - Code Clan

Week 2 - and we are putting the band back together

Week 3 - Program like Efen Reys

Week 4 - Frank Sinatra

Week 5 - Training the Dragons

Week 6 - They put Java in my Ferrari!

Week 7 - Java + Android = Cool Apps

Week 8 - Android - Like putting your pants on two legs at a time!

Week 9 - Happy 1st Birthday CodeClan!

Week 10 - JavaScript... use a semicolon if you want!

Week 11 - Meeting the DOM...

Week 12 - Worshiping at the Cathedral of code

Week 13 - Group Project Week

Week 14 - Speed Dating with potential Employers

Week 15 - This baby corners like it's on Rails

Week 16 - The Gladiators have been thrown into the pit!

Before I knew it I was graduating and had a new SQA qualification in software development. More important than that I'd had a ball and I'd gained 20 brilliant new friends. This was a surprise but so glad, and it alone made it all worthwhile.

Back home in Aberdeen at the end of January, it was all over and I was back to having lots of free time and spending time with my family.

I had my new bit of paper with my SQA on it.

It was time to start thinking about working again. I was refreshed and ready to get back to it.

I was keen on web development so applied for some jobs in Aberdeen and at the same time started putting myself forward for some freelance work under the guise of www.udnysolutions.co.uk

I'd say my friends in Edinburgh had it easier (don't tell them) as there is a tech boom down there and plenty of CodeClan employer partners to choose from.

Aberdeen doesn't yet, but it's trying. I expected a long wait and many rejections.

While I applied for a few jobs I received a freelance contract to update and refresh a local business website. That kept me busy. Udny Solutions had its first job.

I was then thrilled to be invited for an interview with Aberdeen City Council as a Web Developer (perfect!). Suit and tie on I went for an interview with some super nice people and it must have gone well as I was offered the position the following day.

I was chuffed to bits to accept. I am now a Web Developer and I have a shiny new badge with my picture and big bold letters "Web Developer" on it.

I'm loving my new job.

So do I miss my old job? Not really, I miss some of the people. It ended up being more about faff than engineering.

Was being made redundant a bad thing? For me I'd have to say in hindsight, No, I needed a change. I was stuck in a rut. I had spent too long with one company and got little back for it.

Was going to CodeClan worth it? Definitely. Well worth it in fact. I now have a qualification, I had a great experience and gained lots of new friends, and now a new job in tech.

So yeah I'm a Web Developer with a newfound passion for tech.

Big thanks to CodeClan and my fellow cohorts. I miss you guys.

WHEN TWO COHORTS COLLIDE!

So this week I was in training for a couple of days. In the old days, this would have been a game of listening and trying to stay awake. However after 16 weeks of intensive teaching at CodeClan a couple of days was a breeze.

The training was in the customer experience platform CEP of a product by a company called FirmStep. It goes hand in hand with their Content Management System CMS. You can think of CMS as the website and CEP as the application for forms, processes, and workflows for customers visiting the website.

The guy training (Mathew) had travelled up from Edinburgh for a couple of days. The training was very hands-on and we were quickly creating processes, designing forms, making data, and integrations.

Mathew spotted my cohort 7 sticker proudly displayed on my laptop and queried what it was from. It's the class sticker for my cohort when I studied at CodeClan. It turns out that Mathew is also a CodeClan graduate from cohort 3. He graduated in April 2016 and joined FirmStep.

Small world, or is it a small tech industry? It was really good to chat about our time at CodeClan and how we found the whole experience. I had done a week of Ruby on Rails but Mathew had not. The course must have evolved between Cohort 3 and Cohort 7. It's cool to think that two completely different businesses or workplaces that have employees that came from the same coding school can help each other out.

Later in the week, I had another short overview of the CMS platform via video call with a guy based in Canada. It all looks very straightforward and not unlike the Jimdo product I use to do my own websites and this blog. The CMS is very much fill in the blanks with your content and the product takes care of all the code and configuration. I guess this is a good thing in terms of speed and reliability. Probably not so good if you like to code.

In other news, the CivTech challenges were published this week. Seven in total (I thought there was to be 8).

There is quite a range in there. Quite a few if not all could be solved by tech and software. I have been mulling them over this week thinking of possible solutions. I will need to see if Udny Solutions can come up with a viable entry. Who knows. It's worth a try. Watch this space...

Oh and news from cohort 7. There have been 2 more of us who have secured jobs (edited actually 3) this week. Both on the same day. That must be the majority of us are now gainfully employed in the tech industry. Well done guys! Hopefully, our paths may cross in the future.

I have been asked by CodeClan to do a blog post for them on my journey over the past year. I will either post it here or provide a link. Depends on what exciting things happen next week.

Thanks again for reading

Oh and below is why I'm not a happy Windows user. My laptop did this yesterday, and this morning it took it upon itself to perform an update without asking me!!!

IT'S GREAT BEING HANDS-ON AGAIN...

So I get to be hands-on again.

I spent years in my last job working my way up the ranks from junior software engineer to engineer, senior, lead, and then principal. I picked up a growing team peaking at about 10 folks. It became inversely proportional to the number of hands-on meaningful work I actually did. It was more about meetings, plans, and justifying what you needed to do.

I have always thought when a company employs you as an engineer they want you for your brilliant engineering skills, Then you do a good job and they promote you... you then do less engineering, and they want you to deal with Faff (office politics, brown-nosing, failings of others). You are not trained in Faff and you are not good at it but you manage. So they promote you again and you do even less engineering and have to deal with more Faff (runny noses, timesheets, holiday forms). Before you know it you are promoted again and you find yourself as an engineering manager (a job you are not trained for) and you no longer do any engineering whatsoever. So you are now doing a job you are not very good at and don't do any work that you are good at...

Now I am at ACC I'm back in the role where I am employed for something I am good at, I have no Faff to deal with, I get to do hands-on, meaningful work and I'm loving it.

I am in a small team involved with updating and creating a new website. My role is to create processes in the website's customer experience platform (CEP).

It's all part of a content management system (CMS) which seems like a whizzy bit of software. I have read somewhere that it is used by quite a few councils in the UK so it's well used and there are support services and forums for help if needed.

It doesn't take away from the hands-on-ness (couldn't think of a word) because it may be super whizzy but it is just a bunch of clever nuts and bolts and it is up to you to engineer solutions for the CEP processes.

So far I have been tasked with the process and workflows for the waste and recycling services. Basically is a customer accessing the website giving their details making a request and behind the scenes, the CEP process I program will automate the output of the requests.

I have had a play with it this week and have processes working from end to end, generating tasks, emails, and responses. There is some HTML and CSS involved and also some data structures to name and format.

Next week I have a couple of days of formal training to attend on the CEP and also one on the CMS. The CMS is the front-facing website part.

It's the end of week 3 as a web developer and I couldn't be happier. In fact, all the people I am now working with seem happy. Perhaps it's contagious?

I'm even happy with my commute even though it's part car and part bus and involves some walking. I drive for 15 minutes without getting stuck in traffic. I hop on a bus and have another 15 into town. This morning's journey was a hydrogen bus, so calm and almost silent (Sitting on the bus I check my emails, plan for the day and write my blog). I then walk for 5 minutes.

This week for Udny Solutions I did a training evening with a client to show them how to manage and update their website themselves. They were amazed at how easy it is compared to their old flat HTML one. This was key for them wanting to make news updates and add new pictures themselves. It went well and I am super happy to hand over what I created. Roll on more opportunities like that. There is one more hopefully in the pipeline.

So yeah that's me super chuffed to be hands-on again. Thanks for reading