User:ErsatzCulture

Background

I grew up in the north of England, but have spent most of the past 20+ years in London. As a kid, pretty much all of my SF-reading was courtesy of my local libraries, which meant that I read an awful lot of part-two-in-a-series books, and only recently have gotten round to reading their first installments.

I dropped out of reading SF in the early/mid 1990s, due to a combination of finding other interests, and not being particularly enthralled by a lot of of the most heralded books and writers of that era. In the past 3 or 4 years, I've rediscovered written SF, and have been catching up on loads of stuff that I previously missed out on, as well as newer works.

I don't generally engage in "real world" fandom, but I have SFnal presences on Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia and Goodreads.

Me and ISFDB

I have a number of SF-related personal projects in various stages of completion or abandonment, many of which use a local copy of the ISFDB.

Ones that actually got to a state that I felt brave enough to expose to the rest of the world can be found here.

Some bits and pieces from works-in-progress can be found in my Twitter feed.

Some of the code I use to interrogate the database can be found on GitHub. All of this has - as of time of writing - been written without looking at the proper ISFDB code, so doubtless there are lots of stupid errors and misconceptions as to how the database is designed. The code certainly isn't going to win any awards for quality, given that much of it is the result of blundering hacking around post midnight.

Most of my edits to ISFDB are minor data fixes or additions in order to support these personal projects.

My subpages on this Wiki

• User:ErsatzCulture/DevelopmentNotes - how I have my local developer environment set up, notes about the code/database/etc
• User:ErsatzCulture/Tagging - some work-in-progress tools and reports about tagging in ISFDB