hi, I’m Alex! here is some work I’m proud of:
I’ve edited and contributed several tutorials to DigitalOcean. I have a resume focused on this writing work.
I created the harvester codebase for FRDR, a Canadian national data portal, with Todd Trann and Kelly Stathis.
I led a project to implement usable, lightweight zero-knowledge encryption of sensitive data for repository deposit, using Hashicorp’s Vault platform, with Jin Zhang.
I only blog when I get annoyed enough about being the only one in the world to have a particular problem; recently, this included using CUDA under bash on Windows, which will happily soon become unnecessary.
I previously wrote up a solution for handling lossy video in Archivematica, which is also now happily obsolete as related work has been upstreamed.
I don’t like when there’s a big gap between what I can do with shell scripts and what other people can do more easily so I made an OCR app called ochre.
I worked with the Software Preservation Network on creating the first draft of their Reference Guide to Emulation.
I’ve spent more time than I tend to remember dealing with retro computing and emulation of all kinds; I like original hardware but I’m no purist.
In an academic context, I’ve written about the use of ZFS-likes in memory institutions and WYSIWYG XML editors for academic publishing.
I love experimental videogames and I will shill for Oikospiel, 10 Beautiful Postcards, Astrologaster, Elsinore, Mirror Drop, and many others. I tell you all the time (inspired by Holly Gramazio, desktop-only).
Along similar lines, I’m an enthusiastic script doctor, though I can get sidetracked (download my patch here or here depending on your copy of the game).
I developed an interactive fiction game about the Suez Canal starring Klaus Kinski, because if that doesn’t shout “huge audience” I don’t know what would.
Does it beep? I hope it doesn’t beep.
For many years I’ve also run what is in hindsight an idealized example of an Intentionally Small Social Network as outlined in runyourown.social. Fair warning, you have to squint to see the best practices.
Who’s your dad.de? I think I inadvertently stole the name for this project from demi adejuyigbe.
I made the potable february, a bot that keeps David Berman in my life.
I also made a much stupider bot by training GPT-2 on a corpus of Rodney Dangerfield, Don Rickles, and Borat, with help from Zach Foote. (talk)
In early 2021, I was at the Recurse Center, where I made putz, the Does it Beep browser extension, Fart Map, Eggs and Milk Minder 1.0c, To Bezier is Human, ffmpeg on Ice, and other experiments.
I contributed a little personal history to Ashley Blewer’s Internet Girlfriend Club.
I also write movie and book reviews because I can’t help myself.
I tweet too much.
