About

As you may already be able to tell, I am incredibly humble, and the beginnings of my story are equally so. I was born in Enniskillen and raised in Ballinamallard in Fermanagh. I've recently moved to belfast for work (and my sanity)

Early Years

I've always had an interest in technology, and my passion lies in all things functional and creative. As a kid, I'd play with LEGO, K'NEX and Meccano, and would often make things out of paper and tape. I'd spend far longer than I'd like to admit here, toiling away at creating things that never worked as physics was rarely on my side. I'd build swords and shields out of paper, and battle with them, though they almost never lasted long.

I did get good at it though, and ended up making guns out of paper, hot glue and elastic bands. I made crossbows that could shoot grappling hooks, powerful semi automatic weapons, stuff that really would sting if it hit you. You'd think with that I'd be gunning for a position at Lockheed Martin, but unfortunately for young me at the time, they don't hire child prodigies.

My first love: Software

However, I soon found my true calling: Computers. Even before I got my first computer, I had played video games and could only dream of making my own (subtle foreshadowing). We had a family computer that was awful, even at 5 years old I knew it was junk, but it was all I had to complete my primary school assignments, so I got used to it. Eventually, however, my school introduced me to a new program, known as scratch. With this program I could create my own games, think of the possibilities! And that's about as far as I got with it in primary school, was just thinking of the possibilities. I did end up producing a few things with it, but they were terrible, even at the time I thought they were bad. I still have some, which you can view deeply buried in the projects page. Even with Scratch's simplicity I was still dumbfounded as a child, though I did get a second chance to use it in secondary school, and that's where my real journey began.

Once I had been re-introduced to it a few years into my secondary school education I immediately fell in love with it and programming. It doesnt hurt that I also fell in love with Minecraft and some of the fantastic mods for it like computer craft, which lets you code a little robot buddy in Lua in the game. But back to Scratch, I ended up making a ton of games with it around this time, some of which you can view in the projects page! I made space shooters, zombie survival games, 2D platformers, anything and everything I could imagine. I ended up using the software so much, that when it came time to make games as an actual module in ICT, I submitted two fully completed coursework assignments, instead of just one.

My first affair: Hardware

While I spent a good chunk of my secondary school education on the software side of things, that's only really half the story. As when I joined I took on a technology and design class, and instantly fell in love with circuitry and hardware. I loved soldering and creating my own PCB's. I ended up doing it for both my GCSE's and A-Levels where I made a rudimentary radio transmitter and fan, which would turn on a fan when the temperature around it got too hot, and send a signal to a radio receiver which would turn on a light.

It was meant for use inside a vehicle, in case you left a pet inside, It wasn't very good though as the fan was way too low power to do anything and the distance the signal could travel was laughably short. Even so, I still have a keen interest in this side of things, which you can probably tell by the picture of my current workstation on the left.

With this new interest in both software and hardware it was only inevitable that I'd eventually build my own pc to replace my aging laptop, and at around 16 years old I did exactly that. Goodbye crap-top, and hello to a new world of ultra fast computing! Okay it wasn't that fast, it only had an AMD A8-7600 APU, which even for the time was fairly sluggish. But it was mine, and it was enough to start my journey in computing. It's even still running today as I used it to build my parents PC, which is still going strong, not bad for a decade old APU. It wasn't long before I upgraded this thing though, and ended up with an Intel I5-7400 and GTX 1060. Nowadays I'm running far more powerful hardware than even that, but as they say, you always remember your first.

Learning: The hard way

At A-Levels, I took on a Software Systems course and learned my first real programming language: C#. I was tasked with building an application to login and store some data, and this is where I really fell in love with programming. Everything I had learned and loved up until this very point all coming together. All my programming experience, hardware experience, problem solving, creativity, everything! All finally converging on this one single course... I got a D.

Yep, a solid D. It's not far off a failure, and most would even consider it to be one. Though I cant exactly completely blame myself for this. The school I attended wasn't the most up to date, and i had to apply to this course outside of my school since they didn't have the facilities to actually teach a programming course like this. This unfortunately meant I ended up being dropped into the deep end of things, with my only experience beforehand being moving Scratch blocks around. As for my other course though, I got a C in Technology and Design, and a B in Business studies... Yeah I got no excuse for those.

It was a wet day in a tent on a camping holiday when I got the bad news: I had been rejected from every University I had applied to. And as if things couldn't get worse, the weather that day was so bad it left a pool at the bottom of our tent, where my newly acquired Nintendo Switch got submerged and destroyed. Overall, 0/10, would not recommend that campsite.

That morning it felt like the world was ending, I shrivelled up in my sleeping bag, not concerned that my electronics were submerged, wallowing in self pity for hours. It was then that, for whatever reason, I decided to for probably the first time in years to check my emails. That's when I saw it, an email from Ulster University - they had a bridging course for those who didn't quite make the cut, pass it and you get in - and I was invited.