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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

  • 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.

  • Auditing my local Python packages · Python ·

    Python’s virtual environments mean I can have many versions of the same package scattered across my machine. I’ve started keeping a list of my environments so I can see exactly what’s installed, and where.

  • Quietly quantum-resistant blogging · Blogging about blogging ·

    Recent developments have the cryptography world on alert, fearing a quantum computer capable of breaking public key cryptography is imminent. Unbeknownst to me, my blog is already protected.

Read more articles →