About me

My name is Alastair Coote. I'm a software engineer/developer (never know which one to use) that primarily works on the web but spends a lot of time in the intersection where web content and native content meet in mobile apps. My day job is at the New York Times, where I work on the Interactive News desk. We do a whole wide array of stuff but recently I've been doing a lot of elections work, iOS live activities and sometimes combining the two.

About this site

I've lost track of the number of blog platforms I've used over the years. While I worked at the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab part of my job was writing up our experiments on Medium. I enjoyed that experience but very much didn't enjoy that Medium started putting posts behind a signup wall. So I started writing the odd post here and there on dev.to... then they put posts behind a signup wall.

So clearly, time to actually own my own stuff. I originally planned to make a static blog (as I've done before) but realised I appreciated the way that Medium and DEV let you build an audience over time and wanted to recreate something like that. So here I am, on a self-hosted instance of Ghost.

I'm not all that happy with the result, this all feels like too much for something that should be pretty simple but right now it feels like the best option. At some point I'll dig in to make this look and perform better but I've learned that once I start twiddling with the dials and editing the knobs I stop actually writing content. So I'm deliberately putting it off while I clear out the backlog of posts that live in my mind.