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:

• 

  NEW

  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.

• 

  NEW

  Creating a static website for all my bookmarks

  To help me keep track of interesting links, I created a static website that keeps all my data locally. Why do I care about bookmarks, and how does my new site work?

• 

  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.

• 

  Drawing repetitive radial artworks

  Using polar coordinates to draw leaf- and flower-like patterns that repeat in circles around a point.

• 

  “Fixing” the rules of division

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

• 

  Creating a “simple” three-up image layout in CSS

  A step-by-step breakdown of how I made a one-left, two-right layout for my images.

Here are some of the topics I write about:

• aws
• blogging about blogging
• books
• code crimes
• colour
• cross-stitch
• css
• digital preservation
• drawing things
• fun stuff
• generative art
• images
• javascript
• maths
• my tools
• personal
• photography
• python
• ruby
• rust
• static sites
• swift
• talks
• 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.