About me
My name is Josh Holland, and I’m currently a PhD student at the University of Southampton. I am investigating ways to use the string diagrams of symmetric monoidal category theory to model systems of computation such as signal flow graphs and Petri nets. For a friendly introduction, see Graphical Linear Algebra, the blog run by my supervisor, Paweł Sobociński.
Before I started my PhD, I worked for Sirius, an independent IT contractor based in the South of England specialising in open source solutions, and prior to that I studied Mathematics at Keble College, Oxford for my undergraduate degree, culminating in an MMath. I grew up in Worcester, in the West Midlands of the UK.
My extra-curricular interests include music, tabletop games, and languages. I sing with the Southampton Philharmonic Choir, and previously in the Keble College Chapel Choir and Worcester Cathedral Choir. As well as my personal collection of board games, I play Go and Yomi online, uploading tournament games of the latter to my YouTube channel. Beyond using languages to connect with people, I am interested in languages which exemplify radically different foundations to my native English, particularly conlangs. To that end, I have spent some time learning Lojban, Toki Pona and Esperanto; I regularly attend the meetings of the Southampton Esperanto Group, whose website I maintain and host.
I also enjoy playing with yoyos. I post videos of tricks to my Instagram, as well as documenting my culinary exploits, family pets and other things I see around my life that catch my eye.
You can get in touch with me via the social media links in the navigation bar, or by email to josh@inv.alid.pw.
Posts
Atom - RSS- More on git scratch branches: using stgit - 16 April 2021
- Setting up a dev environment for PostgreSQL with nixos-container - 12 July 2020
- Use a scratch branch in git - 23 June 2020
- Hakyll + sourcehut = ☺ - 29 April 2020
- Links for November 2019 - 1 November 2019
- Links for September 2019 - 3 September 2019
- Dear Mr Walker - 3 September 2019
- Links for August 2019 - 6 August 2019
- Links for July 2019 - 3 July 2019
- Links for June 2019 - 1 June 2019
- Children, parents and adults - 11 May 2019
- Links for May 2019 - 1 May 2019
- Links for April 2019 - 1 April 2019
- Dear Dr Whitehead - 26 March 2019
- Worstsort revisited: Is Haskell's type system stronger? - 14 March 2019
- Links for March 2019 - 1 March 2019
- Worstsort in Rust - 28 February 2019
- Trying out Pijul - 23 January 2019
- Three ways to check whether a file is ASCII-only - 19 October 2018
- More on slide rules and complex multiplication - 7 September 2018
- Slide rules - 30 August 2018
- Googling dates - 7 June 2018
- Shined or shone? - 11 April 2018
- Why write? - 21 March 2018
- Hakyll clean URLs and feeds - 18 March 2018
- Lifting monads to Kleisli categories with distributive laws - 7 March 2018
- New website - 9 February 2018