Hi, I’m Dan. Welcome to my blog!
A software developer by profession, I was educated in the not terribly well-known field of the Digital Humanities, where we were trained to capture, process, and make retrievable human knowledge — predominantly in text, the medium that forms the basis of civilisation.
Naturally, to this day I’m fascinated by questions of semantics, words and definitions, language, and philosophy.
Having spent a couple of years in academia — building databases for archaeologists, for instance — I’m now working in enterprise Insurtech to round out my training as an engineer in high-stakes contexts.
Clojure became my language of choice around 10 years ago, and functional programming my preferred paradigm. It’s one of those things — once you’ve “got it,” it’s hard to go back.
Nowadays I’m all excited about LLMs. I think it’s literally the greatest technology ever — a sentiment surely not shared by everyone, and one that deserves a lot of attention and nuance. For the next couple of years, I expect this blog to touch on the topic frequently. I first encountered the field of Artificial Intelligence during my humanities studies around 2005, and have been thinking about it ever since. Still, the LLM revolution caught me, like nearly everyone else, by surprise.
Apart from my quite busy day job, I enjoy writing and tinkering — exploring different ways to build databases that enable interesting forms of data retrieval, for example.
This blog is meant to give form to my thoughts on various topics, and have them ready to refer back to, for myself or for sharing. And otherwise, just to “keep the garage door open.”[1]
Footnotes
A phrase I picked up at some point on Simon Willison’s blog.