Coding
Whilst coding is my day job, it's also a tool that I have used extensively in my research, as well as in my day-to-day life. You can get a good idea of what I'm up to by finding me on:
Some of my coding projects might be directly useful to others, such a python script for working with Ordnance Survey maps, and a webapp that generates Spotify playlists from BBC Sounds episodes. Others are academic, like demonstrations of the moving window method for univariate timeseries forecasting. And others are only of interest to me or the people who have commissioned me to make them, like systems that send SMS appointment reminders based on events in a Google Calendar.
Here are a few of my open source projects; mainly those that may be interesting or valuable to others.
Spotilist
A web app that extracts the songs from a BBC Sounds episode and puts them in a Spotify playlist for you.
OS Maps App Tools
A python script that facilitates extracting, converting, compressing, and deduping maps from the OS Maps app.
Grav Plugin: Custom Banner
A plugin for Grav CMS (written in PHP) that displays a customisable banner on your website.
SSSI Cave Entrances
The results of a web scraping and GIS project to compile a database of cave and mine entrances that are enclosed within SSSIs.
Webmaster and Sysadmin work
I do a bit of webdesign, webmaster, and sysadmin work both freelance and as a volunteer for other organisations.
Freelance
I have a number of clients who I do freelance work for. This is mainly web design: I have developed and maintain a website for the owners of a holiday cottage in France, that includes making bookings, taking payments, and multi-language support. I also work with a complementary health practice in the UK, both managing their website and developing a tool that sends out SMS appointment reminders to their patients to reduce the rate of missed appointments.
Volunteering
I head up the group of volunteers who manage the website and IT infrastructure at the British Caving Association, the national governing body for the sport, with over 5000 members.
I perform the same role for the Devon Cave Rescue Organisation, creating their website, managing their emails, and developing internal tools for tracking attendance at training events and monitoring progression through the skills training and assessment programme.
I also support a number of other sites for causes close to my heart, such as the website and web forum for the Exeter university caving club that introduced me to caving.
Abuse reporting
Keeping webservers secure is difficult. There's such a wide range of threats out there that it's difficult to be aware of them all, and even more difficult to protect yourself against them. I use a number of tools that automatically defend against a number of threats based on abuse reports from other sys-admins, so to do my bit I also report abuse on the IPs that I manage using AbuseIPDB.
