A picture of a person set against the sky.

Hi, I’m Alex.

I’m a software developer at the Wellcome Trust and an open-source Python developer. At Wellcome, I’m helping build a platform for searching and storing our digital collections. It’s taking Wellcome’s assets – books, archives, images, and more – and presenting them through consistent, well-designed APIs.

I contribute to open source Python in my free time, including the Hypothesis testing library and the hyper-h2 HTTP/2 stack. I’m one of the organisers for the PyCon UK conference, and I’ve given talks at a number of conferences.

The site focuses on programming, with the occasional venture into accessibility, maths, bits of travel advice and Victorian engineering. It’s as a way to sharpen my skills in writing, and improve my ability to explain my ideas. If that sounds interesting, I have an irregularly updated blog. I’ve also written about my ideas for running inclusive and accessible events.

I hope you enjoy the site.

Recent posts

13 Sep Slides for PyCon UK 2019 “Sans I/O programming”
12 Sep Streaming large objects from S3 with ranged GET requests
5 Sep Iterating over the entries of a compressed archive (tar.gz) in Scala
19 Aug Getting a tint colour from an image with Python and k-means
12 Aug Removing the DRM from my Kindle books

Contact

You can email me at alex@alexwlchan.net, or I’m @alexwlchan on Twitter.

For anything related to Wellcome, email a.chan@wellcome.ac.uk.