Projects
Writing
articles today I learned AO3
plumber’s guide ideas for inclusive events
https://github.com/alexwlchan/scheduled-screenshots
Personal tools and scripts
I enjoy writing little tools and scripts to make my life easier. If I use something enough that I think other people might find it useful, I add some documentation, tests, and I post the code on GitHub.
- create_thumbnail (v1.0.1, )
- A simple command-line tool for creating image thumbnails.
- dominant_colours (v1.2.0, )
- A command-line tool that finds the dominant colours in an image, and print a palette in your terminal. This uses k‑means clustering to find the most commonly-used colours in a picture.
- emptydir (v1.1.2, )
- A command-line tool that looks for empty directories and deletes them.
- get_live_text (v1.0.0, )
- A command-line tool that gets text from an image using Apple’s built-in “Live Text” feature. This lets you OCR images programatically on macOS without installing any extra software.
- nextjs-pageweight-analyser ()
- A script to measure the page weight of a site built using Next.js, and find ways to reduce the size of the data sent to the page using
getServerSideProps. - safari-webarchiver (v1.0.1, )
- A command-line tool that saves web pages as Safari webarchive files.
Wellcome Collection
I worked at Wellcome Collection from January 2017 to September 2023. Wellcome Collection is a museum and library in London, which focuses on health and human experience. I was one of the first developers on the Digital Platform, which powers the public website and provides access to the digital collections. I helped design and build key parts of the platform.
Some personal highlights include:
- Preservation storage service (Sept 2019–Aug 2023)
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The storage service provides long-term, permanent storage of Wellcome’s digital archives. It replicates files across Amazon S3 and Azure Blob, and provides fixity checking and indexing beyond that of the underlying storage.
- Unified collections search (Jan 2017–Sept 2023)
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The unified search combines catalogue records from multiple source catalogues. This allows researchers to find records in all of those catalogues with a single search box.
- Trans inclusion policy (June 2020)
- I helped write the first version of Wellcome’s trans inclusion policy and guidance, which provides advice for trans staff, their managers, and their colleagues.