I'm Jon. I enjoy travel, food, people, wildlife, creating things, and learning.
I'm happiest when combining many of these things: eating with friends in a new place, discussing interesting topics.
In a previous life, I worked at O'Reilly Media, BEA Systems, Salesforce and Heroku.
This page points to my general interests and other homes across the internet.
Current Projects
I'm building a mobile app, for iOS and Android. The app will be a form of spaced-repetition, targeting students, scholars, and anyone else interested in remembering and connecting facts. A bunch of technologies are involves. Primarily, it's React Native (with TypeScript) for the mobile app itself, and a combination of Ruby and Google Firebase for the server back-end.
We all believe different things about the world, and come to understand "truth" differently. I started out by trying to understand "why some folk are religious", but it seems to have broadened into researching "how we believe" instead. I'm currently researching this topic, producing a series of blog posts.
I've visited over 50 cities in the past three years, mostly in Europe, North America and Africa. Sometimes it's to see a place, eat the food and meet the people, and sometimes it's to go birding. This year, 2020, I intended to visit many more. Covid-19 has put a stop to that, and for now, I visit the past, creating photo albums.
Photos
I quite enjoy taking photographs when traveling and when I'm birding. I usually suffer from vemödalen, the "frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist." I sometimes get over it, and these are the results.
Contact
You can find me at the following places on the web. If you want to drop me a line, please do so. I generally prefer email for long-form communication.