A picture of a person set against the sky.

Hi, I’m Alex.

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

The blog is a place for me to hone my writing skills, and write about anything I find interesting or fun – there’s plenty of programming, but a lot of other stuff as well. Past topics include accessibility, braille, Chinese dictionaries, and Welsh waterfalls.

Sometimes I give talks at meetups or conferences, and I have a list of slides/videos from my past talks.

I’ve also written about my ideas for running inclusive and accessible events.

I’m trans, genderfluid, and my pronouns vary. If you don’t know me, “they/them” is a safe default.

I hope you enjoy the site.

Recent posts

30 Apr Downloading objects from/uploading files to S3 with progress bars in Python
29 Apr Drawing coloured squares/text in my terminal with Python
27 Apr Building Wellcome Collection’s new unified catalogue search
18 Apr Using AppleScript to detect if a Safari window uses Private Browsing
5 Apr Finding the app/process that’s using Secure Input

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?