The Photo (nothing to do with the post): Tofino, Vancouver Island, Canada, 2012. A panorama of 3 photos: Nikon D90, Nikkor DX 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR @ 73mm, 1/1000s, ISO 200, blended in PTGui. © Nick Bec.

Who am I?

This is a pretty existential question and I hope never to think that I've got to a definitive answer. Right now I am a man, a husband, a father, a photographer, occasional hiker, a consultant, an analytics professional, traveller, Londoner, accidental transport planner, and in the past have had lots of other labels.

Simply, my name is Nick Bec, I'm based in the UK, and I do a lot of different things.

Why a blog?

I like blogging. Longer form writing is a dying art in many ways, and I think that's a bad thing. Putting your throughts together in a coherent and sensible way is a discipline and brings huge clarity in thought and communication. It takes more time to do well than many people are prepared to spend, but I find it's worth it to put trains of thought down on paper to get them out of my head.

Defining things by what they are not isn't a good habit, but a blog is not social media, and this site is somewhere I have a huge degree of control over. I am using a hosting platform, mataroa, which allows me to port my content out as markdown files easily, and I control the domain where this is hosted. It's also ridiculously good value at $9 a year hosting.

I have some presence on social media, mostly from legacy accounts or accounts that I registered to keep control of my name on different platforms. However, I dislike the way that the Internet is becoming centralised and gated, and I think that the implications surveillance capitalism and online advertising are likely to be playing out in increasingly nasty ways throughout the rest of my life.

Therefore, this is me staking out a corner of the Internet that is mine and can be a more persistent space for me to develop some thoughts in public.

What is this blog for?

It's very hard for me to convey through my traditional online presence what I actually think and do - lots of my work is no longer technical so there's no repository for me to point to and the work I do is often confidential and not able to be published. So building a portfolio of anything substantial that I can share in public is also pretty hard.

So this blog is an attempt for me to do some slightly longer form writing to try and create a record that I can point to that's independent of any single employer or project. Anything I write here won't be definitive of my current views, but it will be accurate at the time of writing.

It's also safe to say that all views in this blog are my own, and not those of my employer - all errors are mine and I'd be happy to correct them if you want to email me blog (at) nickbec.co.uk.