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:

• 

  Not all blog posts are created equal

  Splitting my site into “articles” and “today I learned” helped me overcome writer’s block and improve my writing.

• 

  Four ways to underline text inLaTeKL^aT_eX

  I’m very picky about the way underlines look, and have spent a lot of time trying to get the perfect underline inLaTeKL^aT_eX.

• 

  Meeting my younger self

  I reviewed 150,000 fragments of my online life, and I was reminded of the friends I found, the mistakes I made, and the growth I gained.

• 

  Adventures in Python with concurrent.futures

  Some examples of how I’ve been using concurrent.futures to speed up my batch scripting in Python.

• 

  A visit to the Crossness pumping station

  Pictures from my recent visit to Crossness, a Victorian pumping station for London’s sewers.

• 

  Getting a tint colour from an image with Python and k‑means

  I want to display text next to an image that looks visually similar to the image, so I need to extract a tint colour.

Here are some of the topics I write about:

• aws
• aws:amazon s3
• blogging about blogging
• conferences
• css
• datetime shenanigans
• digital preservation
• drawing things
• flickr
• fun stuff
• git
• images
• inclusion
• javascript
• macos
• personal
• python
• rust
• shell scripting
• sqlite
• swift
• talks
• tumblr
• 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.