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:

• 

  NEW

  The Good, the Bad, and the Gutters

  A step-by-step guide to a movie poster grid that uses CSS Grid, text-wrap balanced titles, and dynamic hover states.

• 

  Upward assignment in Ruby

  A deep dive into the internals of Ruby and metaprogramming techniques, in a quest for a cursed operator.

• 

  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.

• 

  Using static websites for tiny archives

  I’ve been creating small, hand-written websites to organise my files. It’s a lightweight, flexible approach that I hope will last a long time.

• 

  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.

• 

  “Fixing” the rules of division

  If we want to redefine how division works, Ruby is happy to oblige.

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.