Typography

I have a deep passion for Swiss typography — the design tradition that emerged from Basel and Zürich in the mid-twentieth century and reshaped how the world thinks about visual communication. Rooted in the International Typographic Style, it champions mathematical grids, typefaces (Helvetica by Max Miedinger, Univers, Frutiger, Egyptienne, or Orly by Adrian Frutiger), and the principle that clarity is never an accident.

What draws me to this discipline is the same instinct that drives good software architecture: reduce noise, expose structure, and let the content breathe. The grid is a constraint that liberates — much like a well-defined API contract or a rigorous type system. I collect printed specimens, study the work of Josef Müller-Brockmann and Emil Ruder, and apply these principles wherever I can — from slide decks to documentation to this site itself.

Philosophy of Mind

The questions that animate philosophy of mind are, for me, the deepest ones: What is the relationship between thought and language? Can meaning be reduced to computation? Is the mind a kind of machine — and if so, what kind? My interest traces back to the analytic tradition, beginning with Gottlob Frege's foundational distinction between sense and reference — the insight that meaning is not simply denotation, and that two expressions can pick out the same object while differing in how they present it. That seemingly technical point turns out to have enormous consequences for how we think about thought itself.

Ludwig Wittgenstein — both the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations — is a constant companion. The later work in particular, with its insistence that meaning is use and that private languages are incoherent, poses a direct challenge to any internalist picture of mind. W. V. O. Quine's radical holism — the indeterminacy of translation, the web-of-belief metaphor — deepened my appreciation of just how difficult it is to anchor meaning in anything stable.

The thinker I keep returning to most is Jerry Fodor. His Language of Thought hypothesis — that cognition operates over a structured system of mental representations with combinatorial syntax and semantics — feels to me like the most serious attempt to make the computational metaphor of mind genuinely precise. The Modularity of Mind changed how I think about software architecture: the idea that cognitive systems are decomposable into informationally encapsulated modules maps almost directly onto good interface design. Fodor's late pessimism about central systems — his honest admission that we have no good theory of how the modules integrate — is, paradoxically, what I find most intellectually bracing about his work.

Noam Chomsky's argument for an innate universal grammar — and more broadly for a nativist, rationalist picture of the mind — sits in productive tension with the externalism of Hilary Putnam. Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment — the claim that meanings "ain't in the head" — is one of the most elegant philosophical arguments I know, and it remains a live challenge for any purely internalist semantics. The debate between these two poles is, for me, still unresolved and still worth caring about.

Cinema

I am drawn to films that treat the image as a primary language — where composition, light, and silence carry as much meaning as dialogue. The directors I return to most are Wong Kar-wai and Wim Wenders and Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola — filmmakers who understand that cinema's deepest subject is the passage of time and the weight of longing.

Wong Kar-wai's work — In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, 2046 — uses fractured chronology and saturated colour to make memory feel physical. Wim Wenders, in films like Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, maps interior states onto landscapes with a patience few directors can sustain. What unites them is an aesthetic rigour that echoes, for me, the same values I find in Swiss typography: every frame is a considered act, nothing is accidental.

I also have a soft spot for the films of the Coen Brothers, whose blend of dark humour and existential dread feels like a sibling to the absurdity I find in software development. Blood Simple, Fargo, Big Lebowski. Woody Allen's early work, with its neurotic charm and New York sensibility, also holds a special place in my heart. Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Sweet and Lowdown are endlessly rewatchable.

And now let's go bowling 🎳.