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!
My writing
My life
My archives
Recent articles
Preventing line breaks in
<code>elementsFixing a bug with byte order marks
I didn’t know to check for UTF‑8 byte order marks, so I made a mistake when converting text files. I was meant to use
encoding="utf-8-sig".A Git hook to prevent committing directly to main
I’m not supposed to commit directly to main, but I often forget, so I have the computer remember for me.
Describing all my photos
When I save a photo, I write a sentence or two of descriptive context. It helps me remember what’s in a photo, why I took it, and how I felt when I did.
I don’t want to repeat repeat myself
I wrote a pair of regular expressions to find repeated words and phrases in my source code.