Hello world, and welcome to my corner of the web. This is where I write words about what I'm working on, and post photographs of things I've seen.
I'm a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and so of course my personal website is a wiki (running on MediaWiki). In my spare time I volunteer with WikiClubWest to work on Wikimedia projects, mostly around my family's genealogy and local Western Australian history (especially to do with Fremantle). I try to keep up with issues on all the things I maintain (but usually fail), as well as listing the software that I use.
I try to find time to work in my workshop on various woodworking projects. Recently, that's been focused on building a metalworking bench, and will soon be about a set campaign-style drawers that's in the works. I've a good-sized workshop because I don't have a car.
Travel features in my life, not because I really hugely want to go elsewhere but because I just do — and also because then I can do some interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap, and take photos for Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes I ride my bike to get there, or walk, but more often it's planes, trains and ferries.
I'm currently reading the following books: Canadian Short Stories (Robert Weaver, 1960), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and England, Their England (A. G. Macdonell, 1933), and The Ante-Room (Lovat Dickson, 1959), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson), and The Factory Floor (Carolyn Polizzotto), and Vesper Flights (Anon).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org', the fediverse as @samwilson@wikis.world, or Telegram as @freosam.
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Below are my recent blog posts, and you can jump to the bottom to navigate to other posts from earlier times.
Referencing OSM objects
Fremantle
Persisting your ids … by SimonPoole on 8 March 2026:
you need to not just store the elements_type_, its id and its version, you need to store an associated timestamp, in the simplest case the time when you retrieved the element to create the mapping. To then check if the object has been further modified if the version hasn’t changed, retrieve the element and recursively compare your timestamp to that of the child elements, if any of them are more recent than your timestamp, yes the object has been changed. No need to use historic data or anything exotic, the current OSM data is enough. You could even envision providing an API for this.
Liberty hall
2026-02-27
Fremantle
-
Roche quotation at the Hougoumont beer garden -
Queens Square bore
Rain on the river
East Fremantle
· Swan River ·
Matilda Bay
Perth
Sunset Sounds at Matilda Bay, organised by Western Residents Inc. The band was Catch These Galahs.
Bridge demolition begins
Fremantle
· Fremantle Traffic Bridge · Fremantle · bridges ·
I went for a walk up Cantonment Hill to see if anything could be seen of the bridge demolition. Not much can be, yet.
WikiClubWest meetup in Byford
Byford
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Byford paddocks
Byford
The paddocks of Byford are filling up with houses, in a slightly melancholy way like most suburban expansion. I tried to get a photo of Woongong Brook as we zoomed past (in both directions), but I don't think it worked in wither way. Somewhere around there is the old Wungong farmhouse, and I think a weir. Or maybe that's further along.
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(Later.) I found a photo of the weir:
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