Hi, I’m Alex. I’m a software developer, writer, and hand crafter from the UK.

I build systems for digital preservation – making sure that digital archives remain safe and accessible into the far future. Currently I think about photos at the Flickr Foundation, and before that I helped build services to store and search the museum and library collections at Wellcome Collection.

I enjoy writing, and I’ve been posting at this domain since 2012. I write about a variety of non-fiction topics, with a particular focus on software development. If you want to know what’s on my mind, check out the articles I’ve written, the talks I’ve given, and the lessons I’ve learned.

In my free time, I enjoy doing art and simple hand crafts to relax. I’ve had a lot of fun doing cross stitch, origami and paper craft, and doodling sketches of implausible sci-fi vehicles.

I’m queer and trans. My pronouns are “they” or “she”.

This website is a place to share stuff I find interesting or fun. I hope you like it!

Favourite articles

Here are some of my favourite things that I’ve written:

• 

  Four ways to underline text in LaTeKL^aT_eX

  I’m very picky about the way underlines look, and have spent a lot of time trying to get the perfect underline in LaTeKL^aT_eX.

• 

  “Fixing” the rules of division

  If we want to redefine how division works, Ruby is happy to oblige.

• 

  A day out to the Forth Bridge

  Photographs from a trip to North Queensferry to see the Forth Bridge, the Forth Road Bridge, and an unexpected light tower.

• 

  How KempisBot works

  How I reincarnated a fifteenth-century monk and taught him to use Twitter.

• 

  Doodling with the Mac’s command icon

  Rotating a looped hook around a central point creates a surprising variety of shapes.

• 

  Upward assignment in Ruby

  A deep dive into the internals of Ruby and metaprogramming techniques, in a quest for a cursed operator.

Here are some of the topics I write about:

• aws
• books
• code crimes
• colour
• cross-stitch
• css
• digital preservation
• drawing things
• fun stuff
• generative art
• glitch
• history
• html
• images
• maths
• personal
• photography
• python
• ruby
• screenshots
• svg
• swift
• twitter
• web development
• wellcome collection

If you want to stay up-to-date with what I’m doing, you can subscribe to my monthly newsletter:

I’ll send you an email at the end of every month, with a short summary of what I’ve been up to, links to stuff I’ve written, and a list of things I’ve enjoyed recently.

Check out the archives if you want to see what you’ll be getting.

I won’t spam you, I won’t sell your email address, and you can unsubscribe whenever you like.