Alchemyst

About This Site

Chemistry at Oxford
Image borrowed from ox.ac.uk Admissions Website

The original version of this website was created some time around December 2003 - while I was in my fourth and final year studying Chemistry at St Edmund Hall College, Oxford. I was (and still am) pretty into my tech, so the idea of creating a website to house the notes I'd used to revise for my final year exams whilst working on my thesis wasn't so unusual - and they were digitised already so not a huge amount of effort. They worked pretty well - I got a First so must be mostly okay !

Sadly a lot of the smarts in here have since left my brain - mostly replaced by job stuff. I ended up working as a Software Engineer rather than pursuing a Chemistry career. Still, there's been a steady trickle of people to the website over the years - presumably found through Google (I never bothered to actually advertise it out there anywhere, but Google bots are pretty smart ...). It broke once along the way - the hosting provider stopped supporting that version of PHP ... yes it was that old, and yes it used to be written in PHP . It recently served as a good excuse to brush up on my Python, so I've rewritten the site - content is still the same though. If you're interested in this side of things, the code is open-sourced (see the Github link on the left).

St Edmund Hall College Logo
Teddy Hall's college crest

Whilst I find it pretty hard to remember the details from back then, I'm pretty sure I ought to be thanking a whole bunch of people. Whilst the words in these notes are my own, I remember my fellow Teddy Hall Chemistry year group being a helpful bunch when preparing tutorials etc., and my professors were pretty awesome tutors to boot. I certainly wouldn't have been able to pull these notes together without their assistance somewhere along the way.

Finally, if you'd like to contribute to this site, I'd love to hear from you! I'm pretty open-minded about extending this out if there's anyone who is up for it - let me know via the Contact Form. Corrections also welcome too, of course