About Me

I was a mathematics and physics child prodigy who got caught up in computer science and lost his way. My old physics professors are disappointed in me for that, but I've managed to make a few contributions anyway.

Cultural Background

I'm a rootless cosmopolitan with no single cultural home. If I'm native to anywhere, it's the old pre-WWW Internet, so my personal culture is as much HAKMEM and the jargon file as it is the milky tea, cheeseburgers, baguettes, or döner kebab of my various nations of residence.

Activities

Since the mid-80s I've contributed to many open source projects, some of which are used by around two-thirds of the world's population — probably including you as you read this. I've also worked in research at places like Bell Labs, and I've been at the technical center of a series of startups whose total exits come to around half a billion dollars. (No, I didn't get to keep all that money.)

In addition to all of that hacking, I minored in music composition at university and played in countless bands during the late 80s and early 90s. Later, while building a startup in the late 90s, I grew restless without an artistic outlet and attended art school in the evenings. I now spend as much time making art as making technology.

You can find links to talks and interviews about all of these things on this site's landing page.

About this website

You may have noticed that most of these pages load very quickly and require neither a fast computer nor a high bandwidth network connection — that's intentional. Almost everything is computed in advance using a content management system written in Clojure with a Pollen-like parser called Inkling. There's nearly no Javascript. Everything should work well with a screen reader.

You can read a bit more about why I still maintain a hand-coded personal website in this article.

This entry is part of various miscellany, published December 7, 2023, in Berlin.