About this site
Hi, my name is Jan. Thank you for stopping by on my personal website!
Content
Without further ado, let me tell you what you can not find here:
- Loads of personal information. I have maintained a website with information about myself and my general beliefs in the past, but I believe that this website is interesting to a larger audience and I can’t do everything at once. Additionally, rambling about yourself all the time gets old after a while. My “about the author” page should be enough to provide a bit of context.
- Software development projects. I’ve got a separate development website for that. Most of my effort goes elsewhere, though.
- Spam and useless advertising. If you wanted to support me, I’m sure we could work out something other than looking at hideous ads or “donate now or you’ll die” buttons.
- “Dear diary” articles. I will attempt to provide you with things that interest you, rather than things that demonstrate how superior and funny I am or something like that.
On the other hand, this website will (supposedly) become a collection of:
- Articles about life, the universe and everything. Mostly about life, though. An earlier witty slogan I had for this website was “life & knowledge engineering”, which was supposed to hint at the focus on “life engineering”.
So what’s life engineering? Quoting Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: engineering is the design, analysis, and/or construction of works for practical purposes. So, by extension, life engineering would be the design, analysis and/or construction of practical works related to living life, i.e. things that (hopefully) improve life in some or another way. - Articles about knowledge engineering, which is all about gathering and processing knowledge and building systems which do that.
- Other topics, either purely engineering (computer science, software engineering) or purely creative (music, art), or blends of both (design).
You might wonder what connects these topics sufficiently to maintain a joint website (other than my personal interests). I will argue that engineering is just another form of art. It combines theory and experience with personal insight and creativity. Often enough, engineering is about creating something new, and that means you need creativity.
For life and knowledge engineering in particular, the answer is that humans are basically systems that gather and process knowledge, so one could say that life is a sub-topic of knowledge engineering. Since this is not directly obvious (also, quite a number of people might disagree) and life is a topic of interest to a greater number of people, I am making a point of mentioning life specifically.
Target Audience
My articles combine interest in technology and knowledge with interest in understanding and dealing with life, finding interesting connections between things and fitting them together. In this way, a fair part of everything you can find here will not be interesting for people who care about only one of these topics. That does not mean, however, that they will be useless for everyone. I’ll make sure everyone can profit from at least some of these articles, but in some cases they may be geared towards a certain group of people.
Go Forth and Subtract
I hope you will profit from visiting this website. Just ignore everything that doesn’t interest you; that’s the way the WWW works best. I encourage you to provide me with feedback about the things that do interest you; either by submitting comments to articles or by contacting me in private.
Best regards
Jan
