Skip to main content

Hi, I’m Alex. Welcome to my website!

A selfie! I’m smiling at the camera, wearing a green dress, and sitting in front of a large amount of green foliage. It’s a sunny day and shining both on the side of my face and the plants.

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!

Recent articles

  • Waiting for website changes in the browser · Computers and code ·

    I’m using HTTP long polling and Python’s threading module to tell my browser when my site has finished rebuilding. This gives me near-instant reloading, with no third-party dependencies.

  • Watching for file changes on macOS · macOS ·

    I’ve written a Swift script that uses the FSEvents API to get notified of file changes, then I’m using stdout as a bridge to forward those notifications to Python.

  • Using Playwright to test my static sites · Software testing ·

    Playwright is a testing library that lets you control a browser and check how the page is behaving, and it’s great for testing and scripting web apps.

  • Building a basic cache with SQLite · SQLite ·

    An SQLite table that caches expensive operations has dramatically sped up local development of this website.

  • HTTP GET requests with the Python standard library · Python ·

    For my local scripting, a lightweight wrapper around the Python standard library gets me a friendly API without the dependencies.

Read more articles →