Meet Ian Bufton, Managing Director of LeafOne, the software company behind SampleTrack. Ian has been in the software industry for over 25 years! He’s working hard to grow the scope of SampleTrack. LeafOne want to help even more customers solve their sampling problems with software.
We caught up with Ian to learn more about his software design philosophy, and about the exiting things LeafOne has in store for SampleTrack.
Firstly Ian, what drives you?
Hmm… Creating technical excellence. That would be a seamless experience that’s build around the needs of the user.
It’s partially writing elegant code and engineering innovative solutions, but it’s mostly making software that feels like magic. Take Twitter for example… Millions of hours have gone in to creating content curation algorithms so fast and accurate that you hardly notice they’re there. When you pull down to refresh, thousands of processes are happening in the second or so it takes for your content to be delivered.
Really easy-to-use software is like a magic trick. It looks simple to the user, but there’s lots happening under-the-hood to produce that illusion of simplicity. And ultimately, we want our software to be that fluid and easy-to-use because we want it to make our customers’ lives easier.
Can you tell me a bit about your working relationship with Kris Rowland, and how that’s evolved over the years?
I’ve been collaborating with Kris for about twenty years! I’ve been at Village Software and now LeafOne throughout this period, and Kris has been at a few different companies. We have always worked well together, and Kris has championed the use of our software wherever he’s worked.
In return for this loyalty, we’ve been happy to build our product around the needs of Legionella professionals and integrate unique features, such as integrating SampleTrack with ZetaSafe, which is Severn Trent’s asset management software of choice.
“Really easy-to-use software is like a magic trick. It looks simple to the user, but there’s lots happening under-the-hood to produce that illusion of simplicity.“
What exciting developments have you got in the works for SampleTrack?
There’s quite a lot in the pipeline! One that I’m quite excited about is temperature monitoring. It’s quite important to ensure samples stay within a certain temperature range in transit to the lab, an we’re looking in to a system that can log these temperatures and ensure sample validity within SampleTrack.
Learn more about our Water Sampling services today!
Lastly, can you tell me one interesting fact about you?
How about two! I’m a qualified Rock-Climbing Instructor, although I had to put a pause on that when I had kids. Also, I’m on the front cover of this Nancy Drew book from 1995:
