Zachary Claret-Scott
About
I'm Zach, a 30 year old technical engineer based in Kingston Upon Hull. This is my corner of the internet — a place to track the things I care about, from hunting down the oldest pub in every city to cataloguing everything I watch (and binge), read, and listen to.
Have a look at what I'm up to now, the stuff I use, or find me elsewhere.
By the Numbers
At a Glance
- Work
- • Senior Software Engineer at Conker Group
- • Founder & Principal Consultant (Part-Time) at Claret-Scott & Co
- Education
- • Masters of Science - Cloud Computing, University of Lincoln (ongoing, expected 2026/27)
- • Bachelor of Science - Computer Science, University of Lincoln (2017)
- • BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma - IT and Computing, Wyke Sixth Form College (2014)
- • GCSE - IT, South Holderness Technology College (2012)
Full CV here, or on zachary.claretscott.com
Projects
Weather Station Monitoring
Founded 2024An off-the-shelf weather station turned into a time-series archive: readings pulled into VictoriaMetrics every five minutes and read through two Grafana dashboards that set my garden against my dad's station on the other side of the village, and agai...
VCurl
Founded 2020A developer toolkit for short links, deep links and a growing set of small hosted tools, all sharing one tenancy model, custom-domain system and REST API. It is the platform the rest of my web tools are built on.
Scrobble With
Founded 2020Mirrors another Last.fm user's listening onto your own profile, live. Point it at a friend, a UK radio station or any Icecast stream and every track they play gets scrobbled to you for as long as you choose.
Real Time Balls
Founded 2015A shared ball pit in the browser. Everyone online is a ball, one of them is it, and touching someone passes it on. A university game jam idea from 2015, rebuilt from scratch a decade later.
Three Colour News
Founded 2013A daily paper that reduces the front pages of five British national newspapers to the three colours that covered most of them, with each day's splash headline read off the same scans.
Publications
| Title | Publisher | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Dating Your Supervisor: A Gamified Application for Allocating Student Dissertation Supervisors | EDULEARN17 Proceedings | Jul 2017 |
Full list on Google Scholar.
Volunteering
| Role | Organisation | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Webmaster and Committee Member I own the club website and the online merch store, contribute to decisions on branding, and help wit... | Hull and District Motorcycle Club | Oct 2026 – now |
| Vice-President I rejoined the committee as Vice-President while studying for my MSc. The society had grown well bey... | Computer Science Society, University of Lincoln | Sep 2023 – Jun 2024 |
| Poll Worker I serve as a poll worker for all local and national elections, including council elections, general... | City of Lincoln Council | Apr 2023 – now |
| Independent Remuneration Panel Member I serve on the Independent Remuneration Panel, which meets annually to review and recommend councill... | City of Lincoln Council | Apr 2022 – now |
| President The society had folded before I arrived, so I re-founded it and ran it for two years. It grew to ove... | Computer Science Society, University of Lincoln | Sep 2016 – Jun 2018 |
| Webmaster I ran the club's web presence as a teenager, with my dad formally holding the Webmaster post because... | Hull and District Motorcycle Club | Oct 2008 – Oct 2010 |
Blog
-
05Aug
2025 The Camper's Contradiction: My Quest for Off-Grid Power
#camping #offgrid #tech #solar #anker #outdoors I love camping. There’s a unique peace that comes from trading city noise for the sound of wind in the trees, especially here in the UK. The goal is always to disconnect, to leave the endless notificat... -
14Aug
2024 YourSpotify as a music analysis engine
#music #spotify #lastfm #data I’ve been tracking my music listening habits for decades on last.fm ever since my dad introduced me to the platform – it’s great to see what music I listened to overtime. I used to use last.fm daily to find new music... -
13Aug
2024 Write freely as a fediverse blog
#services #selfhosted #homelab I have wanted to host my own fediverse/activity pub compatible server for a while – however I felt running a full on Mastodon server was to heavy for my use case. And other options seemed to take a bit too much effort... -
13Aug
2024 Change detection for finding jobs
#services #selfhosted #jobs #career #softwaredeveloper I am due to start a new role next week which I am very excited for, but before I confirmed I had to go through the process of trying to find roles available in my industry and area. While sites...
Say hello
Got a question or just want to chat? Drop me a line.