Sam Wilson samwilson.id.au

About me

Hello, world! This is my website, where I explain a bit of what I do and think.

I'm a computer programmer by trade, working for the Wikimedia Foundation. Sometimes I find time to build bits of wooden furniture by hand. I also like mapping.

Search this site:

I've been keeping some sort of personal website since 1997, and some of it is still here. The most recent posts are as follows:

1. 2023-09-17: Family archives in WeAre.xyz
2. 2023-06-30: Swandocks' luffing cranes
3. 2023-01-07: Delayed publication of blog posts
4. 2020-06-11: Homebrew Website Club West Coast meetup
5. 2020-06-04: Anxiety at putting files in their right places
6. 2020-06-02: Pruning find
7. 2020-06-01: HMW Folder 1 almost done
8. 2020-06-01: Discourse in MediaWiki
9. 2020-05-30: Breaking the indieweb
10. 2020-05-28: Traditionalism on the wikis

Tags:
· Flickr · Libraries · genealogy · Fremantle, Western Australia · Woodworking · Websites · Ubuntu · Wikimedia · Mapping · Addressbook (WordPress plugin) ·

Contact

You can email me at sam@samwilson.id.au, or find me (most days) on IRC in #wikisource (and other channels) on Freenode.

I use Fastmail for email, and think they're pretty good. If you want 10% off, here's a referral link. They're a good, open, honest (and even Australian) company.

I'm also on Mastodon:

@samwilson@wikis.world

ORCID 0000-0003-4308-3443

Mapping

I've been contributing to OpenStreetMap since 29 April 2008; my username is Sam Wilson. I occasionally add an entry to my mapping diary. I'm currently living somewhere here:

Reading

I read mainly on my Kobo ereader, Wikisource are my digital libraries of choice, because I can fix problems when I find them and add new books as well.

I record much of what I read (and what's on my bookshelves) in my catalogue on LibraryThing.

Code

All of my public code is on GitHub (as well as this website itself). I try to add what I can to Stackoverflow, Wikibooks, and other collaborative learning/teaching websites. Apart from that, I dip my toes into a bunch of different open source projects.

Data

I use as an online continuously-synced backup service for my non-public data.

Other data goes to Wikimedia sites, Flickr, or Figshare. All is stored in open formats, and what can be is made public (under CC-BY-SA or similar).

I also use Trello for some ephemeral notes and things, because it works well on mobile (and I generate a JSON backup).

Work

I work for the Wikimedia Foundation as a Software Engineer on the Community Tech team.

I'm currently working on these things on Phabricator and these things on Github.