Writing
I write posts about a variety of non-fiction topics, from books to braille, from programming to photography, from colour theory to Chinese dictionaries.
If you’re new to the site, this page should give you an idea of the sort of thing I write, and help you find posts you might like in the full archive. I’ve tried to pick out examples of each category of post – I think you’ll find more to like here than trying to browse the archive chronologically.
If you want to hear about new posts, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on social media.
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Software engineering
I work as a software engineer in my day job, so a lot of what I write about is programming and software. It’s a mix of solving particular problems, explaining how I dealt with a tricky bug, and advice on how to make better software.
Many of these posts have precise titles (“how to solve problem X using tool Y”), which are meant for people searching Google for that exact problem. There are plenty of them in the archive, and they’re useful to searchers, but they’re not the best examples of my writing.
There are lots of posts about software, so I have smaller, more specific tags like python, web development, and error messages, rather than a broad “software engineering” tag.
Photography
I’ve written a few photo essays, where I share photographs and the stories behind them. You can see them all by browsing the photography tag.
Code crimes
Most of my programming posts are fairly sincere. I want to do something sensible, here’s how it works, here’s the code to do it. But sometimes I do something completely silly or ridiculous, and I always learn a bunch of new things about the tool I’m (mis)using.
These are among the most fun posts to write, and you can see more in the code crimes tag.
Pretty art
Most of the art I do is very visual; I like looking at pretty things, and I fill my life with bright colours and patterns. Some of that art is on this site, including some fun experiments with colour, my cross stitch projects and lots of ways to draw things.
Digital preservation
I do a lot of digital preservation stuff for my day job, and it’s a topic I’m personally interested in – even before I started my current job, I was playing with web archiving tools and I’d written a few of my own backup scripts.
I’ve written some posts about it here, and some on the Wellcome Collection development blog. Search the digital preservation and wellcome collection tags.
Personal stuff
There isn’t much in the personal tag right now, although I’d like to change that in 2023. I used to put a lot of updates about my personal life on social media, and keep the site more generic – but I want this site to tell you more about me and who I am. What personal stuff there is tends to be “what I’ve done”, not “who am I”.
