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. My mission here is to provide information and ideas that make a difference for you… and I think that heaps of self-promotion or advertisements would get in the way of that.

• “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.

Go Forth and Subtract

I hope you will profit from visiting this website. I appreciate any feedback you might have about the posts that do something for you (or even those that absolutely don’t work for you); either by submitting comments to articles or by contacting me in private. Similarly, if you’d like me to share my opinion about some specific topic, just let me know.

All the best
Jan