About Me
Since 2000 AD I have worked as a freelance developer of Internet-based software. I have worked with companies large and small, private, public, state-owned, parent-owned, high-performing, low-performing, and two very large organisations that had explicitly banned weapons because of very unhappy staff.
Accurate photographic picture of the artist trying to focus on Dave Smith's frets once upon a Sziget.
Photograph by Mark Milstein of NorthFoto.
My academic background for my Master's degree from Sussex was in artificial intelligence knowledge-based systems, and involved self-organizing systems, hand-coded neural networks for pattern recognition, porting a meta-language called DATR, and coding in Prolog, POP-11, C, Java, JavaScript, and Perl. I chose not to take a PhD in AI as then had little interest in missile guidance, but these days I work with embeddings, FAISS and RAG, like everyone else, with a particular interest in investigating semantic drift in early printed matter.
For the past decade or so I have focused on Typescript and ECMA Script, though I do often write Python and increasingly Julia. Never Perl. Tiny units of functionality are my daily objective, their ordering and clustering that of my weeks and months.
My bachelor's degree is in English Literature, with a special interest in Samuel Becket and George Orwell. I was fortunate to study Millenarianism with the late great Willy Lamont, and both Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad with the wonderful and witty and also sadly departed Cedric Watts.
Outside of work my main interst is music: Hungarian/US folk, rock and metal, and studying orchestral composition. I play various guitars, oud, sitar; I read widely (Camus and English civil war history atm), enjoy mountains, woods, and lakes, and suffer adopting stray cats.
Now that my eldest is in her second year of college and my youngest about to start his final years at secondary school, I no longer have to dedicate so much time to commuting across Europe and hope instead to spend more time on research.
— Budapest, Gödöllő
