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:

• 

  How I create static websites for tiny archives

  Start with a simple HTML file, then add features like templates, sorting, and filtering as they become useful.

• 

  It’s cool to care

  Caring deeply – about art, my friends, and shared experiences – has brought me so much joy.

• 

  How long is my data? 💾

  A fun app to calculate the size of your data in terms of floppy disks.

• 

  How KempisBot works

  How I reincarnated a fifteenth-century monk and taught him to use Twitter.

• 

  Generating art from lattice graphs

  Randomly selecting a subset of edge from a graph can make pretty pictures.

• 

  What I learnt about making websites by reading two thousand web pages

  How to write thoughtful HTML, new-to-me features of CSS, and some quirks and relics I found while building my personal web archive.

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.