Work

How Interact Started

7/1/2011

In 2001 I purchased an app called Code Vault for my Nokia 9210 Communicator. Code Vault let you securely store sensitive data. It had pre-defined templates for things like passwords and credit card information. If you needed to store something that didn’t have a template, you could create your own.

Code Vault eventually became Handy Safe, and I used it on a 9500 and after that, the E90. Since then I've been looking for something like it on Pocket PC, then Windows Mobile and at the time, Windows Phone. But nothing's ever quite matched its utility.

In 2003 (I think) I bought a copy of Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business and Everyday Life. It’s a book on network theory, and it got me hooked on representing data as edges and vertices (nodes and links), rather than structured data in a relational database.

Towards the end of 2004 I spent 3 months in Building 25 on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, writing an app that used BITS to transfer VHDs across a network (BITS was amazing!). After my work with BITS I started playing around with binary data transfers in general, including predefined static fields and key-length-value schemes, chunking larger files, and batching smaller ones.

Sometime after that my need for a modern Code Vault, and the ideas behind Linked and data replication over the Internet started to coalesce into something that did seven things –

A form builder that creates templates for data entry
Add, change and delete data based on these templates
Store data as nodes, and store relationships between nodes as links
Allow nodes and links to be tagged with labels
Make data import and export easy
Synchronise nodes and links across devices
Encrypt everything

In 2010 I wrote version 1 of the Interact desktop client.

The desktop client ticks off items 1 to 5, and 7 from the list above. Next up is building out the sync engine, and a Windows Phone client. Interact languished for a bit after that.

Brexit

In 2017 Brexit suddenly became real enough for us as a family to permanently move to Europe.

And so in 2018 we permanently emigrated. And as a tiny token of respect to all stay-at-home mums I suggested I stay home and take care of the little one (school run, settling us in and all the other things that came along), enabling my boy's mum to bring home the bacon. It was scary, but by ~ 2019 we got settled enough for me to revive the modernisation of Interact.

And that's the story so far!

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