Chris Chedgey
Co-Founder and Director
Chris has a Masters in Software Engineering from Trinity College Dublin, with over 25 years software engineering experience gained in Ireland, Canada and the United States.
Prior to forming Headway Software Chris was the Chief Software Architect and program manager on the Robotic manipulator on the International Space Station, and the $1.5bn IRIS communication system for the Canadian armed forces. As the technical lead on projects with 100's of software engineers Chris was the "goto guy", relied on by management to understand if deadlines would be met. But Chris found that the tools available to him added little value in terms of understanding progress while balancing quality and deadlines. He founded Headway to address this dilemma. The central tenet of Chris' philosophy is that complexity in software projects can be tamed through more creative use of visualization and analysis technology.
He is a keen sailor, has 2 beautiful grown up daughters, lives in Dunmore East, Co Waterford and keeps a couple of pet goats.
Paul Hickey
Co-Founder and Director
Paul has a B.Sc in Computer Science and Mathematics from University College Dublin. He started his first "real" job back in 1985 at Generics Software in Ireland, working for, a certain, Chris Chedgey. He, along with his then partner in crime, Joe Drumgoole, made up the team that implemented Chris's research - the visualization of formal methods in Ada - it seems visualization was always part of our DNA.
Paul has since lived in Sydney and Boston while working for Wormald Advanced Systems Engineering, Lotus Development Corporation and IONA Technologies. In 2001, he hooked up with Chris again, in pursuit of their passion for reducing the complexity of software development projects through the use of advanced visualization techniques.
He now lives in France with his partner and 4 boys, and runs a great little holiday gite on the side.
He looks forward to the day when all software development projects, old and new, adopt architecture management tools and practices, and knows there is a certain inevitability that it will come to pass – “we just cannot go on like this!”
Paul O'Reilly
Chief Architect
Paul was awarded a First Class Honours Degree in Software Engineering from Carlow IT in 1994. Prior to Headway, Paul worked with Aldiscon and later Altion on the design and implementation of several telco administration systems. Paul joined Headway at the outset working as an engineer on the first release of Structure101 and then became our Chief Architect with the development of Restructure101.
Paul lives with his wife and children in Co. Wexford, Ireland. An award winning Irish traditional singer, songwriter, lilter, and musician, Paul has performed on national radio and TV, and with the Irish Chamber Orchestra. His drama has been short-listed at Listowel Writers' Week, his fiction listed for the Seán O'Faoláin Prize, the Bristol Prize, the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Prize, published in the Irish Independent, The Stinging Fly, Natural Bridge (US), online at Necessary Fiction (US), and selected for The Lonely Voice series of readings at the Irish Writers' Centre. He is currently short-listed for the 2011 Hennessy Literary Awards, and is also Natural Bridge's nomination for the Pushcart Prize: Best Writing Published in Literary Journals 2012. He is currently completing his first story collection, and working in film.
See www.pauloreilly.com for more.