2014-2015
An App created for the 2015 UK general election. It took the anonymised tweets of users' local candidates and presented them with any potentially identifying information blurred out. Users could then judge the tweets, deciding weather they agreed or disagreed with them. This gave users an unbiased look into their own political opinions.
It was started at YRS 2014 and was completed for the election. I built it with Zak Cutner.
The app was built in JavaScript, HTML and CSS and packaged up with apache cordova. PHP was used as a backend API to communicate with twitter because JS couldn't handle the OAUTH.
2015
Another YRS project, this time with James Bithell. We got the fantastic opportunity to work with the BBC's then-in-beta API, Nitro. We jumped at the chance to play with this new toy and decided to create an integrated catch up listing service. The idea was to tie together recommendations, reviews and viewing into one streamlined site. Unfortunately, other services simply did not have the public data to make this a reality, so after showing off a proof of concept (it worked with BBC and ITV shows) we decided to suspend the project until we could get some more data.
The site was built on a DigitalOcean VPS. This was my first experience of server management and I learnt A LOT. We made some mistakes, especially with file permissions but it ended up being a really good experience. The server ran Debian and the application was created in PHP with a MYSQL database. This was the first time James and I worked as a team and we learned much about working with this stack. Later we rebuilt the whole thing with the TWIG templating engine, once again a great learning experience and we used this on later projects.
2015-2016
James and I were asked to develop a system to help administrate our school's MUN conference. It was a gathering of 200 people and our software had to work. In addition to building this application from scratch we were to act as live tech support through the four-day conference. The web-app included a large number of features, a live chat, a desktop publishing suite, an app and, of course, a full conference management setup. The event was a huge success and we were able to sort out all of the bugs and issues on site.
James and I used the lessons from TellyStorm to work much smarter on this project. We used TWIG from the start, we built the whole thing with AJAX and we had a clearly defined end-goal, set out in writing. The setup was much the same as TellyStorm: a DigitalOcean VPS, PHP, MYSQL, TWIG etc... We also used Node.js and websockets for the live elements of the system, including the chat. This caused some problems at the event itself, but they were all fixed on the day.
2015+
I help out at "CoderDojos" as often as I can to help teach children to program in a variety of simple languages like scratch and Python. I also volunteer at a Code Club at my local library every week.
2016
I have been working on a number of open source projects, some my own, some larger ones started by others. I work mostly in PHP and Scala (very different languages, I know). The code for all of these can be found here, on my github account
2016 July
I had 5 days of work experience at Cisco in reading on a "Technical Stream" course which took in aspects of IT, Networking and Cyber Security
Sept 2016 - June 2017
For my EPQ (Extended project qualification) I decided to create a programming language from scratch in scala. This includes the parser (built with ANTLR4), AST, runtime and standard library. I received the top grade for this project, an A*.
I was part of the winning team that attended the UK Space Design Competition national finals at Imperial college. There I led a sub-team of 10 people as "director of automation". I was chosen as one of 12 to compete as part of the UK team at the international finals that summer in Florida. There I took on the same role, in which I was in charge of 18 people preparing and delivering a presentation.
August 2017
I spent a week at the London based VC fund Passion Capital where I learnt about the world of venture capital and early-stage investing. There I also worked on a small research project profiling the machine learning industry.