I'm a writer, film-maker, occasional actor, co-founder of /dev/fort and one of the team behind Spacelog, sometime creator of web curiosities, and very rarely a photographer. I mostly work as a technologist. You can find me on twitter as @jaylett, and on LinkedIn.
I'm passionate about story telling; about physical movement and having fun with what your body is capable of. I strongly believe that being well-connected with your body and your sensuality is essential to living an enjoyable life. We need playgrounds for adults, and to give ourselves the permission to have fun using them.
I was born in March 1976; to Liz, a primary school teacher, and John, a secondary school teacher and author (super-lucky people around my age from England might have been taught history using some of his books, some of which are still in print). I have a younger sister, Katharine.
On leaving university, I briefly tried to build what we'd now call a MMORPG
with some friends and no money. When that didn't pan out I joined
tangozebra, which in 1999 turned its focus to rich media online
advertising, with me as Chief Technical Architect and later CTO; in early
2007 we were bought by DoubleClick, now part of the Google Marketing
Platform. Since then I've been CTO for Kudocities (defunct), Artfinder (I left in 2012, but it's
still going) and NSFWCORP, where I
was also a staff writer, which was bought by Pando where I was consultant CTO, and which
was bought in 2019 by BuySellAds. In 2017 I joined Annalect as MD Technology, EMEA. I've
done some technology consulting in
the gaps between. I've been an advisor to about half a dozen startups, and
invested in a few also.
My development background goes right back to working in assembler, hacking games in 6502 machine code on the BBC Micro (mostly to put my name indelibly in the high score table), and trying to write far too complex things in BBC BASIC. Since then I've worked on a text/programmers' editor called Zap, on an information retrieval/search system called Xapian, and on a large variety of other things, some of which I got paid for. These days I'll usually knock up new things in Python and Django, or maybe Javascript and React, although I'm pretty sure we should actually be using compiled functional languages for many more things than we do.
In technology, I value these things
- Learning over repeating
- Getting things done over planning to perfection
- Paper and whiteboards over digital documentation
- Solutions that match their problems' complexity over simple solutions for everything
- A satisfying solution over one that everyone understands
In work, I value these things
- Inclusion and safe spaces
- A company that stands up for its employees' brilliance
- People who support each other in the difficult times, based on respect grown in the easy times
- An environment that allows projects to start properly, rather than being rushed through
If you want to get in touch with me, you could try emailing me, in which case you might like to read about how I (try) to handle email.