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Hello, I'm Gilbert West. I build tools to help people and their organisations.

I'm always open to discussing what I can bring to interesting, impactful projects.

Articles

Below are my latest articles. I've been writing about whatever takes my fancy since 2007, often with multi-year gaps.

AI Ettiquette

Cal Newport recently said that anthropomorphising AI is dangerous and we shouldn’t say please or thanks to machines. I disagree.

The year of getting banned

This year has turned out to be the one in which AI has banned, pushed back and mildly chided me for my words.

Your social media is older than your kids

If LinkedIn was a person, it would be stressed out 23 year old that graduated 2 years ago looking for a job in a world that has changed radically since it left high school. I wanted to see all social networks laid out on a timeline, so here is it.
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There are another 35 articles covering bikes, books, business and coding.

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Side Projects

Below is a selection of pro bono and personal side-projects that I have built in recent years.
It is not a portfolio of my professional work for clients.

Solar Paths

A thought experiment in co-locating solar panels alongside rural active travel paths in order to reduce the need for grant funding, increase their feasibility by reducing land purchase barriers and getting greater community benefit than conventional models..

Carbon.scot

Carbon.scot is tracker of progress towards decarbonising Scotland's economy. This is a data heavy project with over 21 million records analysed and presented as charts. New data is gathered every few seconds from a variety of sources.

Renewables Today newsletter

A free bi-weekly roundup of news from the world of renewable energies every 1st and 3rd Monday of the month.

Public sector renewables league table for Scotland

An annual survey a league table of local authorities and health boards in Scotland to track their roll out of renewables.

Love Dumfries v2 (for DPAG)

Directory of businesses, clubs, services and events in Dumfries. Free listings for anything in Dumfries.

Missing Links (on behalf of Cycling Dumfries)

Missing Links are the gaps in the active travel infrastructure in and around Dumfries. The project began as a series of blog posts by Cycling Dumfries, morphed into a community funded book and is now a website for tracking progress towards filling in the gaps.

Launching soon

The Ratchet Podcast

Plumbers, electricians, HVAC and wind turbine engineers will save the world. We interview the people wearing the hard hats and working at the 'coal face' of the energy transition and find out how they got where they are and learn about the opportunities in a variety of sectors.