Marcus Povey

I’m brought in as a fractional CTO / senior architect to get systems under control, align technology with the business, and apply AI in ways that are genuinely useful. Available for fractional CTO, architecture advisory, or short-term high-impact engagements. Lets chat! practical-alchemy.com

The Unsexy Infrastructure That Makes Scientific Data Reusable A proposal has an ID in ARIA. A visit has an ID in ARIA. A dataset has a location. A PDB deposition has its own accession. Individually these things are identifiable, but unless they can point back to each other in a stable way, the…

Reflections on Florence: Data archaeology and the case for European long-term raw data archival As I leave the magical city of Florence behind, I thought I'd share some reflections. #EOSCSymposium2026

Have a great event! @instruct-eric.bsky.social director Harald @schwalbe-lab.bsky.social and lead developer @mapkyca.bsky.social are participating Today @astburycentre.bsky.social organised event in Leeds I was sharing the news! @ccpnmr.bsky.social @ccp4mx.bsky.social @diamondlightsource.bsky.social

Turns out it wasn't I Robot or Terminator that guessed the future correctly, it was Red Dwarf: lnkd.in/p/gTrXUjQK

Heading out to Barcelona for the #md4sb kick off meeting at @instruct-eric.bsky.social Barcelona centre. Discussing new combined techniques, data management and AI pipelines

Sovereignty, sustainability, and single points of failure I write this sitting in an airport on the way to Germany, where I will be meeting with leaders several European research agencies to discuss how we can ensure the resilience of infrastructure in an increasingly tumultuous world

@fragment-screen.bsky.social @instruct-eric.bsky.social @cnb-csic.bsky.social

ARIA Gets Data-Aware: What We’re Building for Fragment-Screen A little bit of what I have been working on for the last couple of years as part of the Fragment Screen project coordinated by the Day Job

Based on the hackathon we ran the other week with representatives from @envri.bsky.social Data Terra @embrc.eu @egieinfra.bsky.social GRNET and @instruct-eric.bsky.social present representing @eosc-beyond.bsky.social EOSC Association and EOSC United

EOSC Service Catalogues in the Wild: EEN, EOSC Beyond, and the Case for Starting Small There is a reasonable argument that the best way to design an interoperability standard for EOSC service catalogues is to look at what nodes are actually publishing before deciding what to mandate. So I pulled…

We had representatives from @envri.bsky.social Data Terra @embrc.eu @egieinfra.bsky.social GRNET and @instruct-eric.bsky.social present representing @eosc-beyond.bsky.social EOSC Association and EOSC United

The Second EOSC Catalogue Hackathon: Still Building, Now With More Reality The first EOSC catalogue hackathon proved federation could work. The second made it more real: messier, broader, and much more useful. With EOSC Beyond, Data Terra, ENVRI, EMBRC, EGI, GRNET, and the Life Science Connect…

I is in your repositories, cross linking your identifiers

Due to critical maintenance at our hosting facility, Instruct digital services & ARIA are unavailable this morning. We expect this work to be completed by 1pm CEST today. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Spent a little time this afternoon extending my eosc-node middleware to include a speculative @eosc-beyond.bsky.social to EEN service catalogue crosswalk. Should allow chaining to DCAT, which could be useful to some folks. Standard disclaimers and validation required. gitlab.com/aria-php/eos...

EOSC Node DCAT Service Catalogue Implementation Guide Following on from the #EOSC hackathon I ran a few weeks ago, I thought I would write a brief implementation guide for any other nodes that want to try playing with what we did

Getting ready to represent the life sciences connect node on behalf of @instruct-eric.bsky.social at the eosc federation meeting hosted at the EC

Introducing MeetQuorum, a Self-Hosted Meeting Scheduler Scratching an itch for my team, I build a Doodle clone over a couple of hours while enjoying some lovely wine in a sunny pub garden.

@instruct-eric.bsky.social forms part of the Life Sciences Connect Node (along with @elixir-europe.org , @embl.org and @eurobioimaging.bsky.social ), so this is an important step towards making our services available to the wider European scientific community.

Introducing Milkshake, a Sovereign, Local-First Task Manager Not wanting to bury the lede; I built a todo list application to replace my Remember The Milk subscription, entirely using free AI tools, on a Saturday morning. Here's how...

Stop Talking About Federation. Build Something. Last week we had a hackathon during which time we successfully demonstrated discovery and federation of catalogues between EOSC nodes

The Man with two brains Autistic note keeping, FTW!

To give an idea at the speed of change in AI, here are two images using the same prompt "photo of alternative universe ww2 where the allies use dragons when storming the Normandy beaches". Stark the difference in just a couple of years.

AI is brilliant! Now, stop wiring it into everything. As we rush towards the AI future, it is important to take a beat to consider that AI security is... terrible.

Had another "Oh Shit" moment working with the AI this weekend, blog post incoming, but ... wow...

Mapping EOSC EU Node Service Catalogue to DCAT Based on work done in EOSC United, I have drafted how one might map the required fields from the EOSC EU Node service catalogue schema to DCAT.

Code is now a Commodity Writing code is not what a developer gets paid for in 2026, but that doesn't mean you can get away without knowing how to code. AI has disrupted the software industry. The code is getting cheaper. Judgment is not

Very lightweight but might be of use to the various @eosc-beyond.bsky.social partners, not to mention other EOSC nodes

Introducing the EOSC node (sort of) Got a little impatient so started making a thing

Being prepared for Agentic Search AI Agents are people too, and in the future they're going to want to use your services.

There but for the grace of God and all that, so shouldn’t throw too much shade… but if a single entity, biological or silicon based, can nuke your production database and all backups in one go that was a failure mode waiting to happen. Lesson for us all - assume someone will screw up at some point!

Presentation I gave to my team on Friday around usage of AI, vibe coding and my own experience. May be useful to you, enjoy: www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2026/04/27/h...

Even if you choose not to use AI for development, managers and clients will assume you are. Expectations of timescales will adjust accordingly...

Having fun exposing some of the capabilities of ARIA to AI via an MCP server, also built largely using AI (Google Antigravity). Round and round we go!

If you are running a Research Infrastructure or are writing a EU grant application and need help with access management, then please hit me up! www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2026/04/07/w...