Profession

I'm a software product creator who aspires to build things that are both useful and beautiful.

You can checkout my GitHub profile to see my work but here are a few quick links.

Personality

I am an intuitive empath. My Myers-Briggs personality type is ENFP. The sixteen personalities website says that I'm a turbulent campaigner but that make me sound a bit mad 😬 Intuitive empath sounds cooler 😎

Principles

I don't think we talk about virtues enough anymore. Here are the ones that I aspire to the most.

Honesty, integrity, tolerance, reason, humility, compassion.

I love 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey _{I recommend the audiobook read by the author.}.

I particularly like habit 5.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

The principle of most respectful interpretation is very important to me.

I am a passionate advocate of Effective Altruism. It provides a guiding framework for my endeavours and I would like it to do the same for others. I'm particulary interested in Longtermism which considers the lives of those who may exist in the future to be of similar or equivalent value compared with the lives of those who already exist. There is a great Kurzegstat video on YouTube about this.

Dream

I am a dreamer, and I long for a future in which technology has given humanity the freedom to thrive amongst the stars 🌟

Such freedom would include the ability to safely travel anywhere allowed by the laws of physics as well as the autonomy to choose a purpose according to one's own unique temperament and abilities without being constrained by lack of opportunity or misfortune.

I believe that humanity's potential in such a future is far greater than we can imagine.

Mission

My mission is one that is shared by many others.

Improve the probability that humanity becomes multi-planetary

It is entirely possible that we are the only intelligent species ever to have existed and furthermore that our origin of life is the only one there will be. Many consider this unlikely given the vastness of the observable universe but the fact is we have no evidence of alien intelligence thus far and our understanding of the processes that led to our own origin of life are limited. We cannot rule out this possibility and it would therefore be wise to hedge against it especially given the potential consequences…

If we are truly unique then we have a moral duty to preserve the 'light of consciousness'. We would not only be saving ourselves but also every other species that already exist and (more importantly) every species that could ever exist. In other words, we may be the de facto stewards of life in the universe.

The difference between a universe brimming with life and one that is dead is almost impossible to comprehend so I take this mission very seriously and would like more people to do the same.

As a software engineer there are limts to have much I can contribute to this mission directly. It may be that the best way for me to do this is to promote Effective Altruism and dreams of becoming a multiplanetary species to others who are better able to move the needle on this probability than I am 🚀

Hobbies & interests

I agree with Richard Feynman’s sentiment that “anything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough”. However I spend most of my free time:

Parenting! 👪
Hacking on hobby projects 🧑‍💻
Playing guitar 🤘
Playing & watching StarCraft 2 ⌨️
Bouldering 🧗

Some topics of particular interest to me are Artificial Intelligence, Astrophysics, Astrobiology, Effective Altruism (particularly Longtermism), and Space Colonisation. I also enjoy creating and debating absurd hypotheticals.