alexwlchan
Alex Chan — Software developer and digital preservation specialist
Software developer on Python, digital preservation, and creative coding.
alexwlchan.netAlex Chan writes about digital preservation, accessibility, creative coding, and the quiet satisfaction of solving interesting technical problems. Posts move between professional expertise (they work in digital preservation) and personal reflections on inclusion, art, and the web — always with a generosity of spirit and care for detail. The site itself reflects those values: CC BY 4.0 licensed, accessibility-first, and full of small delightful touches.
Written by Alex Chan.
Regular
Publishes weekly or bi-weekly
1
Independent Blog
English
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Describing all my photos
I take a lot of photos, but I only keep a fraction. Every week, I go through my camera roll and sort my photos into three buckets: keep, delete, or “needs action” (pictures like paperwork or screenshots that I need to do something with, but don’t want to keep indefinitely). This lets me filter out repetitive, blurry, or uninteresting shots. A few years ago, I reviewed my entire 30,000 item library and I deleted almost a fifth of my photos, but I haven’t missed any of those photos. If anything, b...
I don’t want to repeat repeat myself
Yesterday at work, a customer spotted a typo in our UI: “you can use the use the Tailscale CLI”. After the typo was fixed, I wanted to find other cases of accidentally repeated words or phrases. I used two regular expressions to search every codebase for unnecessary repetition. The first regex finds repeated words: \b([A-Za-z]+) \1\b Backfill product data from from Stripe Learn more about about inviting users Argument must be be one of host name, IP set name, IP prefix, or IP There’s a capturi...
Rebuilding the computer room
One of my distinct memories of childhood is the “computer room”. When I was young, computers weren’t a ubiquitous feature of our lives; they were bulky appliances with a fixed location, and you had to go somewhere to use them. At home, it was my parents’ study. The first computer I remember using is their iMac G3, which is about as portable as a small tree. At my grandparents’ house, it was their office in the corner of the house. Their desktop PC was far from the kitchen, bedrooms, and living r...
What can wonky APIs tell us about the web?
A few days ago, Misty posted something that caught my eye: Misty @misty@digipres.club Finding myself asking if there's ever been a wonkier official browser API than canPlayType 18 Jun 2026 at 17:52 The HTMLMediaElement.canPlayType API tells you how likely it is that a browser can play media with a given MIME type, but the response is unusual. The word “likely” is important here, because it’s not a simple yes/no answer. The possible responses are: "" – no, the browser can’t play the...
Using the Screen Capture API to record a browser window
I was on the Lego website recently, and I enjoyed their animation on their age picker – rather than a plain text field, the numbers are made of Lego bricks that animate into view, accompanied by the sound of bricks snapping together: Recorded from identity.lego.com/en-GB/age, 6 June 2026. Lego was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen. He purchased the first plastic moulding machine in 1947, and patented the stud-and-tube coupling system in 1958. I don’t know if this age p...
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If you appreciate writing that's technically thoughtful and deeply humane — where a post about archival systems might sit next to a reflection on accessibility or a creative coding experiment — Alex's blog is a warm, careful presence in your feed.