Hello, good morning/afternoon/evening* and welcome! (*please delete as appropriate)
I'm an unrepentant geek who loves all things engineering, scientific or otherwise techie. I would say I love maths too, but I should probably leave that to the experts :-)
I've been playing with computers and writing software since I was 9 which is way more years than I care to think about. In that time I've been lucky enough to work on almost everything from tiny embedded systems to mainframes, and from simple stand-alone devices to vast distributed or decentralised systems. Along the way, I built operating systems, network stacks, compilers, and blockchains/distributed ledgers. For a while I also helped design CPU instruction sets.
That journey has led me all over the world and I've had the privilege of collaborating with some amazing people. I now live in Abu Dhabi (UAE), although you'll occasionally still find me in North Wales (UK).
What is this site?
This site hosts information about open source projects I've been involved with, my blog, and my open source research notes.
Lately my open source work has focused on AI, looking at what it takes to build an AI operating system.
Design philosophy
Over the years I have used a lot of different frameworks to host my blog site. This one is very different. Early in my experiments using ChatGPT to help me write code, I decided to build my own virtual DOM library so I could understand how single page applications (SPAs) work. Over time that library has evolved into a simple component framework. This site is built using that framework, with no third party dependencies apart from the nginx web server that serves the static files.
While pure HTML sites are all the rage, this site has exactly 37 lines of HTML! Everything else is generated using TypeScript. The SPA is very fast to try to give a great user experience.
One problem with SPAs is search engine optimisation (SEO) as they really can't do much with JavaScript. To help with that I wrote a pre-rendering tool called siterender. It ensures that whatever page you first hit has been pre-rendered to give a full HTML page, but subsequent navigation is super fast as it's all done in the browser.
Disclaimer
Any opinions expressed are solely my own.
Privacy
The site does not use cookies (which is why you don't get asked about them). The back-end server does collect temporary logs for 28 days so I can check the site is working correctly.
Third party links and advertising
This site does not host any advertising. If I include a link to anything, it's because I think it's interesting or useful. If there are any ads there, it's the linked article that I think is interesting, not any advert.
Contact me
Please feel free to reach out to me on: Email, LinkedIn, or X