A picture of a person set against the sky.

Hi, I’m Alex.

I’m a software developer at Wellcome Collection, a museum and library exploring health and human experience. I’m helping to build a platform for searching and storing 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 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.

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

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.

Recent posts

16 Oct The Oboe of Optozorax, and Other Objects
14 Oct Prevent accidentally copying the prompt character in console code snippets
6 Oct READMEs for Open Science
4 Oct Beware of incomplete PDF redactions
1 Oct How do you work with non-engineers?

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?