About

I go by Naru on the Web, he/him, age 31. I'm a software engineer by trade and training. I also studied architecture at university.

If I'm a software engineer, why do I have such a... er, basic web site, you may ask? It might not look like much, but it suits my purposes just fine. It communicates what I want to say, it's easy to update, and it's just a refreshing, relaxing place to be.

At various times and places I've been a musician, a linguist, a gamer, a mystic, an actor, a DJ, a runner, a raver, a philosopher, an artist, a writer, and probably a few other things that are escaping my mind at the moment.

These varied and rather romantic interests have deeply (and perhaps surprisingly?) influenced my engineering work. To me this influence seems natural. To others in my field, it seems strange or even perverse. But I think my extracurricular pursuits have been the key to my ability to create software and code that's simple and adaptable and easy to use and... well, just nice to work with. At some point I plan to write more about my software design principles and my vision for how software could better support humanity.

On Elvishness

I talk about Elves and the Elvish aesthetic a lot on this site, so it's probably worth spending a few words explaining what that means, exactly. Tolkien's Elves (and their derivatives in D&D and other works of fantasy) are my reference point. I interpret the Elves in Tolkien's writing as a vision of a bettered humanity: kinder, wiser, and saner than our present selves.

I don't much care for the Elves' portrayal in the Lord of the Rings films as tranced-out, ethereal beings. My overwhelming impression from reading LotR, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion is that Tolkien meant Elves to simply be people, and people with an acute degree of life in them, at that. To be Elvish is to transcend people's opinions and images, to live freely and be one's own undeniable self. As Sam Gamgee put it, It don't seem to matter what I think about them. They are quite different from what I expected—so old and young, and so gay and sad, as it were. And witty, in a sort of self-deprecating way, too... though it doesn't come up much in Tolkien's writing, I think being able to laugh at yourself is an essential part of the Elvish mindset.

One of the goals I have for this website is to explore what it would mean to bring an Elvish mode of existence to life in the modern world. Amazingly, I have prior research to lean on. The architect Christopher Alexander has written some very exciting books in which he describes, essentially, how we can become old and young, and gay and sad ourselves—by shaping the relationships between the things around us according to a few simple principles. I can't possibly do justice to his work here, so you'll have to wait a bit for my other pages to unfold...