For the Silicon sector’s best networkers, bouldering is the latest way to get to the top in your career, says
Trends Rosamund Urwin
THEY’RE easy to spot. Head to The Arch’s Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey, and the climbing walls will be peppered with developers in tech-themed T-shirts, either with logos (Silicon Roundabout firms love staff to emblazon their loyalty across their chest) or with coding in-jokes that leave the rest of us flummoxed. As the co-founder of video ad tech firm Unruly, Sarah Wood, told me recently: “In the dev community, bouldering is the new table tennis.”
When Unruly moved offices earlier this month, staff were asked what they wanted — and many said a bouldering wall. Developers, of course, are never happy with the status quo, always searching for tweaks and improvements. So the wall on the ground floor of Unruly is an augmented reality version, with images projected onto the wall. A specialised camera tracks the climbers’ motion and they have to dodge dropping rocks and catch falling pandas. In the US, such games are being rolled out across Brooklyn Boulders gyms, where you tot up points as you scale and move across a vertical face.
This isn’t the only way tech has infiltrated climbing. The Everest VR programme — based on more than 30,000 photographs shot from both land and air by Icelandic visual effects studio RVX — is part-game, part-simulation. Users wear a HTC Vive headset, which constructs the world’s tallest mountain around them.
Unruly’s staff were early adopters. Paul Cox, a senior software developer, joined two years ago. He was a keen climber and within two months persuaded many of his fellow developers to join him. “Paul told me about it. I went down and was hooked straight away,” says Arbër Pllana, senior product manager at Unruly. Since then they have both noticed that more and more tech types are climbing there. “We look around and say, ‘Have you seen that shirt?’ You see Google T-shirts, all the major browsers. Tech database vendors give out a lot of T-shirts.”
So what attracts developers to climbing? “It is a physical activity but it’s a mental challenge as well — it’s about p ro b l e m- s o lv i n g , ” argues Pllana. “There’s a strong parallel to being devs — you’re trying to figure out how best to get from bottom to the top. The gym is mundane. Here you’re using your brain and body and talking to people.” Cox adds: “I often refer to it as vertical chess. It fits so well with the tech community.” And team bouldering means team bonding.