This about section is too long. I will cut it down. In the meantime, if you want to contact me, the best way is by email. If you like my work and want to support me, don’t. Donate to Wikipedia instead.

Clouded Hills

Welcome to clouded hills, my place on the internet.

I once read a great analogy that compared using big tech (be it facebook, medium or substack) to renting a house. I’m now in my 30s, and don’t want to rent any more. This is my house, and I can do what I want with it. I can do dumb things, like knocking through a wall so I have a bigger room, or spending a Saturday afternoon animating the logo so it moves around when you hover over it.

This is going to be a place to host the content I produce. Mostly, that will be essays on politics, philosophy, science, or software development. The essays are currently the thing I am most proud of. I will also host musings: less complete, quicker turnaround bits of writing, probably closer to a traditional blog, as well as notes: fragments of ideas that may one day become an essay. As it evolves, we may get other types of content here, depending on what whims I am drawn to.

If you want to recreate your own version of clouded hills, all the code is on github. It was very much inspired by Maggie Appleton’s much more beautiful website.

The Author: Joe Buckley

I find my creative energies pulled in three directions: politics, science and software development.

From as long as I can remember, I have been motivated by politics. This is the influence of both my parents. I have been a Labour Party member for far too long, and will probably remain one, despite how I might disagree with it on some major issues. I’ve held various roles within and without the Labour Party, from Chair of Tower Hamlets LCF (a mostly bureaucratic body, where people shout at each other for no good reason) to Secretary of Tower Hamlets Co-op Party (a mostly pointless body, where people shout at each other for no good reason) to Chair of Scientists for Labour (which has much less shouting). Currently, I’m less politically active than before, but I’m still strongly motivated by politics.

If politics was my first driving force, science was my second. Hopefully, in the next few months, I will have a PhD in Biophysics from UCL. If you see me in a pub and ask me about viruses, I will either enthral you for the next hour, or bore you to death for the next hour, depending on your constitution. I am still actively pursuing scientific research, although mostly sidestepping most of the bureaucracy of the academy. You can find my Google Scholar here.

Despite those interests, I am a professional software developer. I completely fell into software development in 2018, the backend of the cheap money fuelled boom. I ended up working in insurance for a few years, where I managed to learn my trade, before moving into sports tech. I am currently a principle developer at Arc Simulations, a company that is doing really cool stuff in cricket, that I am very excited to work for. For my non-professional stuff, my github is here.