Take a break with 1Spatial's Seb Lessware

Tell us about yourself? 

I did a degree in Cybernetics and Computer Science at Reading University after having no idea what to do (other than something technical) and picking it from the A-Z list of the degree courses. The course included Artificial Intelligence but we graduated when AI was not the flavour of the month, so it’s taken a while for it to come back round again. It was long enough ago that half way through the course they added a module about the “World Wide Web” as it seemed to be getting quite popular.

I started at 1Spatial (a.k.a Laser-Scan back then) as a software engineer as my first ‘career’ job, having to pick between offers to work on spatial data in Cambridge or embedded hardware programming in Watford - it was an easy choice. Since then, I’ve worked in development, consultancy and product management and I am now the company’s Chief Technology Officer.  I have also moved from Cambridgeshire to the Cotswolds to Norfolk with four kids – enough to keep things interesting.

Fun fact about you? 

I’m half French and even my English half includes at least Irish and French ancestors so I’m technically minority English. I didn’t get the Mediterranean DNA.

What do you enjoy most about working at 1Spatial? 

I guess it’s the variety of tasks: Coding (less now), planning, presenting, demoing, architecting, designing, writing articles, recording podcasts, sales proposals, budgets, attending events etc. 

What are your favourite geospatial products/technologies and why? 

Clearly it would have to be something like the groundbreaking Apollo Guidance Computer or the SR71’s Astro-Inertial_Navigation_System that uses stars to navigate. 

For an industry/1Spatial pick then the hotspot generation capability in 1Integrate is pretty cool – one of those things that seemed impossible but it actually got built and gets decent results: Automatically reverse-engineering the rule logic to identify the location of the issue e.g. if the rule states that a polygon feature must not overlap other polygon features of a certain type then a failure will automatically find the locations where they do actually overlap without anyone having to write any of that logic.

What’s the most interesting solution problem or data challenge you’ve tackled?  

We had fun trying to work out ways to reverse engineer thousands of parallel slope lines (representing Irish ringforts) back into discreet polygons and also identifying the top, bottom and sides of the slope using 1Integrate as part of the OSi Prime2 data migration project. We can see similar tricky spatial problems being managed in TMPA or in fact many of our current data processing and validation projects.

What makes 1Spatial a great place to work? 

1Spatial is small enough to have an impact and not be ‘lost in the machine’, but large enough to work on big projects. There’s also a few of us in the Senior Management Team that have developed our careers at 1Spatial.  I started off as a developer, Bob (our CPO) started off as a support engineer and Abbie (Head of Marketing) started off managing ‘front of house’ and reception.

If you were given an airline ticket to go anywhere in the world where would you go and why? 

I would need more information: Is this a return ticket? Does it include accommodation and expenses? Would I bring my family or am I on my own? I’ve never been to Asia though so maybe somewhere there.