About this website

This is a personal website: somewhere to keep my own writing and links to things I find interesting.

It is designed above all for speed and readability. The typography and layout owe something to Edward Tufte’s stylesheet recommendations about presenting text on the web, and more recently to Gwern Branwen’s Gwern.net. I prefer pages in which structure comes from the content rather than from decoration, and markup that remains as close to semantic HTML as practical.

The site is generated with Hugo and hosted on GitHub Pages. The content is written in Markdown. It is deliberately static: I have no particular use for accounts, sessions, databases or most of the machinery that modern websites have acquired. I have begun adding small uses of AI where they are useful rather than ornamental.

About me

I’ve worked in IT for most of my adult life and now work as a Solutions Architect. My background is in mathematics and computing, but my interests have always wandered fairly freely across literature, history, art, music, science and technology.

I was born and brought up in Wales, left for university in my teens and have lived mostly in England since. I’ve worked very briefly in the United States, France, Belgium, Germany and Japan.

I came relatively late to travel. A cycling holiday in France with my now wife, Helen, changed that, and since then we have travelled widely in Europe and further afield. Japan has a particular place in my affections: we were married there. I am also especially fond of Spain, Italy and Greece because of their wonderful histories.

Languages interest me partly for the glimpse they give into other ways of organising thought. My French is ok-ish in favourable weather; my German, Spanish and Italian are considerably less so, and my Japanese and Mandarin are mostly evidence of good intentions.

Years ago, while appearing on a television quiz, I asked why there were so few science questions. The host replied that they did not regard science as part of general knowledge. I have remembered his answer.

One of my abiding prejudices is against the division of knowledge into respectable compartments. Science, mathematics and technology are as much parts of culture as literature, painting or music. Conversely, technical education is no excuse for incuriosity about the humanities. Almost anything becomes interesting once you know enough about it.

My politics have changed predictably since I joined the Labour Party at fifteen, and rejoined in the heady year of 1997. These days I’m suspicious of political tribes and increasingly doubtful that a single left-right axis captures the real world. Michael Oakeshott’s formulation appeals to me more now:

My musical tastes run mosly to classical music, particularly Baroque, and to the popular music I listened to in adolescence and have, like most people, failed to abandon. I like poetry and think other people should too, and should memorise more of it. I like art, literature and history, although with most contemporary work we haven’t yet had the benefit of time doing its ruthless editorial work.

I periodically decide that this is the year in which I shall finally become properly competent at statistics.

I can also be found on X (Twitter) at askdavidjones, on Instagram as askdavidjones and on LinkedIn as thisisdavidjones