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:

• 

  Recreating the bird animation from Swift.org

  The Swift.org website got a redesign, including an animation of a swooping bird, and I read the source code to understand how it works.

• 

  Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany

  We’re gonna need a bigger printer.

• 

  It’s cool to care

  Caring deeply – about art, my friends, and shared experiences – has brought me so much joy.

• 

  Hyperfocus and hobbies

  The power of ADHD-associated hyperfocus and how I’ve become wary of feeding it too often.

• 

  A visit to the Crossness pumping station

  Pictures from my recent visit to Crossness, a Victorian pumping station for London’s sewers.

• 

  Building a personal archive of the web, the slow way

  How I built a web archive by hand, the tradeoffs between manual and automated archiving, and what I learnt about preserving the web.

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.