It all started with such good intentions. I was going to make regular updates to this site, allowing me to keep my friends up to date with all my news, without having to email each person individually.

It hasn’t exactly turned out that way – updates have gone from occasional, to infrequent, to almost never. But there’s no point beating myself up about it – much better to accept reality and make use of what I have.

So from now on, I expect to make intermittent changes to the site, but I’m making no promises. Everyone who knows me knows that I am not short of opinions, but whether I will be able to convert those opinions to web content while they are still relevant remains to be seen.

There is a section of Sydney Park, close to my home, which has been converted to a recovered wetland. It’s home to a variety of wetland birds, and frogs, and water lilies (Nymphaea caerulea – I think).

I am an enthusiastic proponent of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) – at last count I had 63 repositories in my GitHub account.

Most of my recent work is in Kotlin (I was introduced to Kotlin in 2018 and I have since become an enthusiastic convert), although I still do some development work in Java.

Check out my GitHub account, or see my JSON Kotlin libraries at kjson.io.

If you do a search on Google for "Peter Wall", you’ll find that it’s not a particularly uncommon name.

The most prominent by far is General Sir Peter Wall, KCB, CBE, ADC Gen., the current Chief of the General Staff of the British Army. It amuses me to think that someone who knew me as a child might wonder, however briefly, whether he and I might be the same person.

Then there’s the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Canada — a gift from a Vancouver businessman named, unsurprisingly, Peter Wall. This Peter Wall is also the owner of the tallest building in Vancouver (I’d always heard Vancouver was a lovely city but now I have another reason for visiting). Because universities frequently generate a lot of web references, the Peter Wall Institute tends to figure prominently in the search results for Peter Wall.

There’s also a former Liverpool football player, the Dean of the Diocese of Niagara, Ontario, a former Junior Mr. World (one of my favorites) and many, many more. And there’s me.

So if you’ve found this page through such a search and you’re wondering which Peter Wall I am, let me summarise: I was born in Cumbria in the north of England in 1951, moved to Manchester when I left school, and emigrated to New Zealand in my early twenties. I lived in Auckland for many years before moving to Melbourne, Australia, and then to Sydney. In late 2000 I moved to the U.S. and I lived in New York for almost 8 years before moving back to Sydney in 2008. If these facts fit the person you’re looking for, chances are you’ve found me.

For a while I had a section here linking to the websites of friends. But when I checked recently, many of them were defunct (not that I can criticise), so I’ve decided to drop the section. I don’t imagine a link from this site would add a lot to anyone’s SEO score, so I don’t think it was helping anyone very much anyway.

If anyone would like their link reinstated just contact me – I’ll be happy to oblige.

For information about this website, see here.

This website, all text content, formatting, programming and photographs are copyright © 2001 – 2021 Peter Wall.