Hi, I’m Alex. Welcome to my website!

I’m a software developer, writer, and a hand crafter, and I live in the UK. In my day job I build software for digital preservation, and I think a lot about archiving and long-term systems.

This website is where I share stuff I find interesting or fun. That includes notes on technical problems I’ve solved, personal reflections or thoughts, and fun toys that I’ve built.

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

I hope you like it!

Favourite articles

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

• 

  create_thumbnail: create smaller versions of images

  I’ve made a new tool that allows me to reuse my thumbnailing code across all my projects.

• 

  The Internet forgets, but I don’t want to

  I don’t trust platforms to preserve my memories, so I built my own scrapbook of social media.

• 

  My favourite books from 2022

  Romance and rust, gender and grief, horror and the House – what I enjoyed reading this year.

• 

  Not all blog posts are created equal

  Splitting my site into “articles” and “today I learned” helped me overcome writer’s block and improve my writing.

• 

  Large things living in cold places

  Using cold storage tiers to reduce the cost of storing Wellcome’s digital collections in the cloud.

• 

  Doodling with the Mac’s command icon

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

Here are some of the topics I write about:

• aws
• aws:amazon s3
• blogging about blogging
• conferences
• css
• datetime shenanigans
• digital preservation
• drawing things
• flickr
• fun stuff
• git
• images
• inclusion
• javascript
• macos
• personal
• python
• rust
• shell scripting
• sqlite
• swift
• talks
• tumblr
• 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 one email a month, telling you 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 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.