Hi, I’m Alex.

I’m a software developer at Wellcome Collection, a free museum and library in London. I help to search and store the collections, with a particular interest in digital preservation.

I have a fairly active online presence – I tweet a lot, and my blog is where I share ideas that don’t fit into a tweet. You can read my posts on the web, or subscribe to them as an RSS feed.

I write about anything I find interesting or fun – there’s plenty of programming, but lots of other stuff too. Past topics include accessibility, Chinese dictionaries, and Welsh waterfalls.

If you’d like to see everything I’ve been up to, my projects page is a good starting point. It includes links to everything I’ve published online.

I’m trans, genderfluid, and my pronouns vary. If you’re not sure, “they/them” is a safe default.

I hope you enjoy the site.

Blog posts

Here are some posts I’ve written recently:

• 

  One small stitch for yarn, one giant leap for yarn-kind

  I made a cross-stitch blueprint of the Apollo Moon lander and the Saturn V rocket. July 2022.

• 

  Fictional phone numbers in For All Mankind

  Where did this UK phone number come from? June 2022.

• 

  Creating an Alfred Workflow to open GitHub repos

  Automations for my automations. June 2022.

• 

  Experimenting with jq as a tool for filtering JSON

  I wanted to learn jq’s more powerful features, so I tried to filter some JSON from the AWS Secrets Manager CLI. June 2022.

You can see more of my blog posts, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Contact

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

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

If you enjoy what I write, perhaps say thanks?