About Me

Biography

I didn't grow up in a particularly tech literate family. My father loves audio and has put hundreds of hours along with thousand of pounds into the various audio systems we have around the house but the process of setting it up is a most painful chore to him - he finds the magic in the result of listening to beautiful music from home as if he were sitting in a live crowd. I'm quite different, I love the process of setting up new technology and have done from a very young age.

I can remember trying to find old bits of hardware like radios and TV remotes that we weren't using around the house anymore and taking them apart to try and figure out how they worked as a small child. I can't say I ever put them back together successfully but I was captivated by the magic of technology. As I got older and started getting technology for birthdays and Christmas, one of the best parts of the respective days would be running up to my room to setup the new things that I'd been given and messing around with them to test their limits and see what I could do.

In Year 7 (aged 11), I took my first secondary school Computer Science lesson. While this was nothing like the GCSE and A-Level I would go on to do, it was a substantial step up from the IT lessons of primary school where we had one IT room among the whole school with aging computers and teachers that were as technologically illiterate as any of us. It was likely in Year 7 that I fell in love with software. It was then that I started to try and learn code.

Obviously, I had messed around in Scratch and Kodu Games Lab and all of the similar gamified coding "languages" that you throw at an eager child in primary but it was here that I decided to throw myself into the deep end. I thoughts that the next logical step (Python) was beneath me. After all, I was the great Goliath - ever unbeaten. I decided to try and learn C++ in an afternoon. I'm sure you can guess how that went.

That knock to my confidence made me largely drop programming (to even call what I did "programming" is a stretch though). I still enjoyed messing around with computers but I didn't think it was for me; something better left for the people that were actually smart. My attention shifted on to other interests like planes and everything that made the aviation industry tick. It was around Year 8 that aviation took a choke hold on my life. I was fascinated by the magic of it all and the way in which mankind took physics and bent it to its will to do something that was supposed to be impossible left me in awe. The interest developed as I bought Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and all the hardware to go with it and I fell all the more in love so much so that it became my dream to be a pilot.

When it came time to pick my GCSE options for Year 9, I decided to take Computer Science more as an excuse to spend more time on the computers than anythings else. It was through the GCSE that I was introduced to Python - the programming language of choice for my school. It was a skill I took quite quickly to. All my years of spending my life rotting in front of a computer finally paying off as the steps to the small problems were given would appear in my mind almost instantaneously. It was addicting. Maybe my previous bad experience with C++ was a fluke? Maybe I just should have started from the ground instead of being cocky. Any which way, I was in love. I have never been a great artist, never a skilled musician, never an actor; so the code that I was writing (even at a simple level) was an incredible creative outlet to which I had no comparison. As a result, programming became one of my great hobbies.

I ended up taking my code home with me and started to have my own personal projects that I would complete in my own time. This allowed me to develop my skills at a rate faster than the rest of the class that would leave their code in the classroom while I would eat, sleep, and breathe Python. It got to the point that when we started to work on larger scale projects in Year 10, I was writing large sections of code that everyone on my row would end up using in their projects too. There were even a tidy handful of occasions when even the teacher would ask me for help.

It was in Year 10 that my studies were interrupted. On Saturday 7^th of January 2024, I was diagnosed with Chiari Malformation. I had been having headaches for a number of years and had been putting off doing anything about it under the assumption that it was just one of those things a person has to put up with in life. This idea had been backed up on a visit to my local GP that said it may be a reaction to heat or exercise and that I should just take paracetamol before putting myself in those situations. On the day of my diagnosis, I was called into the hospital as a matter of emergency. We received the phone call around 8:30am and made it to the hospital at around 10:00am. Having done a number of tests, I was sent to the ward having still not been told what was wrong with me. It was there that I received my diagnosis and was told that the severity of my Chiari Malformation in combination with my minor hydrocephalus meant that my condition was life threatening. At that point, their chief fear was that the pressure from my cerebellar tonsils on my brain stem was so great that it would paralyze me such that I was unable to breath and would suffocate to death. For that reason, they held me at the hospital for a number of days ready to put me on a ventilator at a moments notice should the worst happen.

Over the following months, my condition worsened somewhat. After a visit to A&E and a second MRI, I eventually had my first operation in February of 2024. It was an ETV. This procedure reduced the risk of death considerably as it helped drain cerebral spinal fluid from my brain which reduced the pressure on my brain. The issue of the Chiari Malformation still remained and was later solved during a second surgery in April of the same year. This was a thoroughly painful experience that left me in the ICU for half a week hooked up to any number of machines, tubes, and wires. Despite this, I still sat my Maths GCSE (a year early) less than a month after my discharge with stitches still in the back of my head and still unable to fully feel my lower legs. For my efforts, I received a grade 9 (the highest grade available) and went on to do the further maths course the following year in which I got an A (the highest grade available under that exam board).

I sat the rest of my GCSEs in 2025 (the same year as the further maths course) and came away with a 9 in Computer Science (the highest grade available). I'm now studying for my A-Levels one of which I am happy to say is Computer Science. I must confess that I enjoy our programming lessons substantially more than any of the theory due to the level of freedom they grant me but I don't think I would change anything about my choices of subjects nor where I've decided to study them.

As I look to the future, I think about developing my programming skills in my own time by pushing myself further within Python as well as learning web development and returning to my nemesis - C++ - like Achilles' return in The Illiad. Within my career of becoming a pilot, I hope to get my medical sooner rather than later and apply for the numerous cadet programs that various airlines are running at the moment.