About me
Hi, I'm Jon 👋🏻 I live in Tooting in south-west London with my wonderful partner Julie, and I've spent most of my life doing things with music, art and computers, sometimes simultaneously. At the moment I am lucky enough to be working at Tate where I lead the product and engineering teams.
I am passionate about technology and consider myself very fortunate to have grown up at roughly the same pace as home computers; my first one was a TI-99/4A and I've owned or used just about every major model since then. I thoroughly enjoy messing around with PCs and am rarely happier than I am when spending an entire day getting my computer to automate a task which would otherwise have taken me five minutes to accomplish by hand.
I adore art and can spend hours with pieces that I like. One of the many incredible things about my job is being able to be completely alone in an exhibition or gallery space, and this really is like no other feeling in the world.
Everyone who works at Tate takes a photo of the empty Turbine Hall at some point
My greatest obsession is music, in just about all its forms. I will listen to almost anything and at the moment I'm in love with The Lot Radio which has such a fantastic and eclectic mix of DJs. I spend a lot of time messing about in Ableton Live and Cubase, and I have a collection of random musical instruments ranging from a cheap ukulele and some panpipes we bought home from holiday all the way up to a Novation Summit. I DJ, mostly techno and trance from the early 90s to today, but I like to mix it up and will throw in any songs that I think sit nicely together. I play classical piano badly; when I was a kid I was much better than I am now, but I gave it up when I was a teenager and really regret it, so I'm trying to get back into it (with limited success, as I struggle to find the time). My advice to any teenagers reading this: don't give up your piano lessons.
I am convinced that I will eventually hear the perfect performance of Mahler's 2nd symphony, but while I've come close on occasion I haven't found it yet. That doesn't stop me booking tickets for it every time it's on.
I treat myself with nice food – my favourite restaurant at the moment is Trinity in Clapham, and the best meal I've ever eaten was at Ricard Camarena in Valencia – and nice wine. I particularly like red wines from Barolo and the more austere style of white wines from Burgundy. I buy far too much wine but at least that gave me an excuse to build a database to catalogue it all. I love to cook but couldn't imagine doing it professionally.
I support West Ham United so must have done something pretty bad in a previous life. I am frantically trying to work out what that was so I can avoid doing it again this time round.
I sometimes dream of opening a beach bar on a tropical island, but usually I realise pretty quickly that I would rather visit a beach bar on a tropical island than actually do the work of running one. Nonetheless, it's an itch that I might scratch one day.
It might be AI generated, but it's only an imaginary beach bar anyway
You can find me on LinkedIn where I am very serious and professional, on Spotify where I listen to lots of obscure electronic music from the 1990s, and on Instagram where I post pictures of wine bottles, art, and Mildred the Tate Modern cat.
Here are all my contact details if you want to get in touch.