About this website

I’ve recently revamped this website and I’ll be using it to collect links and content I find interesting, and for my own occasional writing, so the important things are speed and readability. I’ve closely followed the suggestions of Edward Tufte’s stylesheet recommendations for simple and clear text on the web, and a long-standing aim is that markup should be as close to purely semantic as possible. The principles derived by Dave Liepmann from Tufte’s writings are guidelines, not mandatory diktats, but they’re very useful guidelines. I’ve also been influenced by Gwern Branwen’s Gwern.net in this most recent site revamp, though I hope not to be too copycat as the site evolves.

This is a static website, generated with Hugo (written in Go/Golang), and it’s served from Github Pages with a build action when I push content to the repository. Content is written in Markdown and the custom domain name is registered via Google. I’m beginning to build some AI into the site – it’s limited at the moment to automatically generating the brief description of page changes in my changes section.

Simplicity and speed is exactly what I wanted for this revamp. I don’t have any need for complicated, dynamic, session-based pages so this setup does the job well.

About me

I’ve worked in IT for nearly all of my adult life and I’m currently a Solutions Architect, which means I’m mostly hands-off in my day job.

I’m Welsh, though I moved from Wales for university when I was in my teens and I’ve lived mostly in England ever since. My being Welsh doesn’t mean much to me. I was born and brought up in the English-speaking part of Wales and I like to point out to Welsh nationalists that the de facto national language of Wales is English.

I’ve worked in the UK and — briefly — in the US, France, Belgium, Germany and Japan. I hardly travelled abroad when I was young but got the bug when I met Helen, my partner, who started me off with a cycling holiday in France. Since then we’ve visted the US many times, all of Europe, Turkey, India, and the Far East. We’re yet to explore Africa, South America, and Indonesia. Favourite countries to date are Japan, where I got married and Spain, Italy and Greece especially for the history.

Like most British people I’m not great at languages - a little French and less German, Spanish and Italian, and very little Mandarin and hardly any Japanese. I try to learn languages espcially before I travel because of the additional insight it gives into other cultures and it’s polite but I don’t blame the British in general for their lack of facility with languages, as if it betrayed insularity or xenophobia, a common accusation; we inevitably have an asymmetric relationship with other languages & countries because we’re already speaking the international lingua franca.

Years ago, on a TV quiz programme, I asked the host why they didn’t have more science questions and he replied,‘Because we don’t consider science to be part of general knowledge.’

I’m convinced everything can be interesting if you invest time and effort. As someone educated in maths and working in IT I’m very aware of the supposed philisitinism of the STEM-trained but I’d turn the accusation around onto the Arts crowd. Next to nobody knows much about, or cares about, the humanities and arts either, and in any case our culture includes science, maths and technology. This isn’t a criticism – people have their lives to live and that’s difficult enough.

Politically I’m fairly ordinary, starting out on the Left and drifting rightwards as i aged. I joined Labour when I was 15, just as the entryist Militant group gained a stranglehold on the Labour Party Young Socialists – so I became a Trotsykist, which had the attraction of annoying my parents. Militant was kicked out and prompted that 1985 speech by Kinnock, when he berated Liverpool Council leaders, but I’d already dropped my involvement by then. I joined the party again when Blair took over, left again, and now the simplistic arrangment of policies along a L-R continuum no longer makes sense to me, and I dislike political tribalism. I’m more conservative now, in an Oakshottian way.

I like some music – ‘classical’, especially Baroque (which isn’t classical classical) and the popular music of my late teens but then, everyone likes the music of their late teens.

Unlike almost everyone I’ve ever met , I’ve always liked good poetry, though most is bad–to–toe-curlingly terrible. It’s very important to memorise poetry.

I like art of just about any period, though very contemporary stuff is difficult because the rubbish hasn’t been winnowed out and there’s so much rubbish.

I like most kinds and periods of literature with a few exceptions and blind spots but, as with art, the good contemporary stuff is swamped by the bad – anything younger than about 100 old is, to quote Zhou Enlai, too early to tell.

I like history. I wish I was better at maths, and I keep meaning to teach myself more stats.

You can read my CV here You can find me on X (Twitter) at askdavidjones, on Instagram as askdavidjones and on LinkedIn as thisisdavidjones