Mark Hoogenboom

I live in a small village in Huntingdonshire with Paula, my love, and Posy, our cat. And a pheasant called Edward who regularly drops in for a meal and very likely is more than one bird.

I work as a software engineer. The introduction of the Euro and the Y2K bug shaped my early years. The Java ecosystem has been my home since the beginning of the millennium. My language of choice is Kotlin. Currently I work at Starling Bank. I have a homelab consisting of five Raspberry Pi's, which serve websites, run a dbms (PostgreSQL), a source control server (Gitea), build server (Jenkins), a Kubernetes cluster and various other bits and bobs.

I read fiction and non-fiction. I'm interested in history and current affairs and support The Guardian. My politics are secular and social liberal. I am a member of Humanists UK and the Liberal Democrats. I'm concerned about climate change and inequality. We have to find a way to live sustainably and share the burdens and benefits of centuries of human progress. I believe in the European Union. Until 2016 I also felt part of British society, then sixteen million neighbours told me their truth.

I'm not creative, but art is important to me. I'm interested in philosophy, many of its questions I believe are the subject of psychology. I'm interested in language, natural and computer, certain aspects of which I believe cover another large chunk of philosophy. I studied mathematics before starting to work in software development. This diagram is inspired by The Joy of Abstraction by Eugenia Cheng. And just when you thought I couldn't be more boring, I also collect coins. And in the past I played the board game draughts at a competitive level.

I regularly run. I have clocked over 14000k on my Garmin watch. Getting older means getting slower, but I seem to be able to go further. That being said, I did improve my PB on the 10k by almost two minutes in my fifties. I rarely race, occasionally I join a Parkrun.

I also like to walk, and take photos of desolate landscapes and grey seascapes. My photos have popped up in pages about Deibühl Kapelle, Esch-sur-Sûre Castle, Herbeumont Castle, Kröller-Müller Museum, Lyveden New Bield, Middlesex Hospital, Moor Divok, Restormel Castle, Speke, surfing and a book on medieval castles.

And you are still here. I guess I better explain myself. My online presence is intentionally small. I joined social media very early, for work. I believed it would be great. Not anymore. I have closed almost all my accounts. To be not completely undiscoverable, I put up this page.