Hi, I’m a software developer by trade, and interested in bridging the worlds of software architecture and the larger world of economics, politics and society generally.

My life influences include:

  • A degree in Cognitive Science, the intersection between Computing and Psychology
  • 25 years of software development and architecture
  • Watching my kids grow up and their personalities develop
  • Time spent travelling, including living with tribal peoples for 2-3 months
  • Working with various large client companys through work, and the disfunction and political intrigue
  • A keen interest in various subjects including
    • Evolution
    • Machine Learning and discrete optimisation
    • Economics
    • Politcs
    • Functional Programming, Mathematics and Category Theory
    • Complexity & Network Science
    • Cheating and Deception in the animal and human worlds
  • Living in the UK through the time of Brexit

Themes in work that have influenced my thinking:

  • In design, the trading off of different goals or metrics
  • People and behavioural psychology, incentive structures and unintended consequences
  • Maintaining complex systems over long periods of time
  • Limitations of the human mind when it comes to complex code bases
  • Chunking and the ability to jump from detail to overall structure quickly
  • The nature of information, levels of detail and granularity

Books that have strongly influenced me recently: