My name is Liz. I'm a software engineer with a particular fondness for data pipelines, backend systems and debugging sessions that most people would rather not attend. My career started with COBOL on HP3000 MPE - which I mention not to age myself (although COBOL is still very much a thing) - but to explain why I feel compelled to figure out what happened when a system fails.

I've worked various tech jobs over the years from COBOL on HP3000 MPE back in the day to web development in Ruby (both on Rails and in Sinatra) for the UK Parliament via the usual alphabet soup of VBScript, PHP, SQL, NoSQL, ASP.Net and something that involved messing with Open VMS on the Alpha platform, the details of which, frankly, escape me.

While I was working for Misco, we1 built our own server stack with mirrored servers, heartbeats, failovers, fibre channel disk arrays and all sorts of shiny toys. That was fun. The first machine arrived without its rackmount kit2 so we did what any normal disgruntled customer would do - went to B&Q for a pile of bolts and wing nuts and narrowly avoided buying a Dremel. Happy days.

More recently, I've worked for the UK Parliament, the not for profit civic participation group mySociety, and legal entity specialists OpenCorporates - where I spent several years building and modernising data infrastructure, including finally migrating some notoriously temperamental Elasticsearch workloads to OpenSearch, and putting together a modular data-gathering system on AWS. I also did a lot of mentoring of junior and mid-level engineers, which I'm glad of; it's something I wish had been more available to me earlier in my career. By that point my own work had a habit of getting done in whatever time was left after everyone else's questions were answered - which, it turns out, is a perfectly fine way to work as long as nothing's on fire.

Thanks to the Open University - seven years of part-time study alongside a full time job - I hold a tech-based BSc3. I got a First, which won me a front-of-section seat for the graduation ceremony in Ely Cathedral; robes, procession, the ceremonial mace. And composer John Rutter on his way to collect an honorary degree for exceptional contribution to the arts and sciences.

Lately I've been exploring AI and agentic workflows, which is either very exciting or a sign that I never learned to leave well enough alone.

Selected things I've built, for work and otherwise

Claude Code Workflow - a structured agentic workflow for Claude Code, putting an Analyst, Architect and Developer to work in sequence from a saved spec file. The self-correction moment that sparked the accompanying blog post still makes me smile.

Rehydrate Tweets - when Twitter announced it was pulling the free API with minimal notice, this was a scramble to grab and hydrate my own stash of 40,000-odd4 favourited tweets before the lights went out. AWS Lambdas, S3, Athena, Python, and a disclaimer about test coverage that I stand by entirely given the circumstances.

Historic Hansard - a searchable archive of UK Parliamentary debates, linked to from such luminaries as the History of Parliament Trust, the National Archives and at least one US university, and therefore a constant source of joy and pain when I try to find a citation for something and get my own work suggested back at me. Probably the open source project I'm most proud of (so far).

Bookshelf Revisited - a personal ebook catalogue that's been quietly ticking along since 2010. After years of occasionally puzzling over how to add editing features to a flat file system, a friendly AI suggested a Sinatra app and helped me build it.

Also in the archive…

Various Scraperwiki scripts - a variety of scrapers for a variety of purposes in a variety of languages. All of which seemed like a good idea at the time.

@RobotBrook - a surprisingly entertaining Twitter bot who stepped up to fill a gap and did so admirably. Still there, but fallen silent for obvious reasons.

Programming.by - a resume page service to showcase your CV at programming.by/your-name-here that failed to turn project lists to profit. Domain lapsed.

And if you like largely tech-based waffling, I occasionally blog about stuff on here - including AI tools, a 13-year-old bookshelf project that finally got the features it deserved, and that time I performed surgery on a MacBook with parts from eBay.

  1. That's "we" as in "the Systemax EU dev team", anything else would be weird ↩
  2. I should point out that this was before parent company Systemax moved into the server market, we ordered our initial test kit in from someone better known for making motherboards ↩
  3. BSc (Hons) IT & Computing ↩
  4. hmmm, that would work equally well without the dash ↩