Just Me
This page is a bit of an experiment. I have broken up 3 aspects of my life and broken them down into 3 different temporal flows.
This page was last updated June 2021
Just Another Human
My path to the present
I was the firstborn of 3 boys, raised in Ireland, spending younger years in Donor, and moving to Drogheda when I was twelve.
My mother is Bi-Polar and was a violent mother. My Dad was extradited and prosecuted for fraud when I was 7. I didn't see much of him for four years when he moved back home, only to leave Ireland a few years later.
At age 11, I lived in American for six months, dragged back to my mother due to some laws and some lies.
At age 15, my mother was committed for the first time. So I was allowed to move to England to live with my Dad.
At age 17, I moved back to Ireland when my Dad lost his job during the 2008 recession.
17 to 19 were some of the toughest and left their mark.
At age 19, I got accepted into a 1-year multimedia course and went to university right after graduating in 2015.
After a year of being unable to find paid work, I spent most of my time playing World of Warcraft where I met my wife. Who is the second-best thing to ever happen to me
Then in 2018, we had our son Darwin, the best thing that has ever happened to me.
What life is like now
Right now, I'm doing everything I can to be a great Dad and Husband.
Darwin is 3, and his personality is starting to develop. Watching him become him has honestly been the most rewarding part of my life so far.
COVID-19 has made things more complex than they used to be. But our little family has without a doubt, grown stronger through the challenges.
The extra time and energy from working remote have also lead me to understand myself. I always knew I saw and understood things differently from most people, but I never thought it could be diagnosable.
It's both scary and unshackling to think, the way I think might have a name, and techniques to make it easier to live with. But it's a year-long wait for a specialist, so I won't know for a while yet.
What could the future look like?
I plan on watching my little monkey grow into a bigger monkey.
I want to stay on the track I already am on.
I have almost entirely healed from my childhood. And I get to spend every day of my life with the two people I love more deeply than I could ever express.
Projects
Read about the Tinkerer.
What I have tinkered with
During University I got to play with 3D, script writing, animation, flash, and web projects
For my thesis I created an AR game in Unity which was a lot of fun.
In the years since university I have created all sorts of little things, a few that stand out are, Hexout, Steam Filter and Playing With Hexagons.
All of which you can see on my projects page.
Check out my past ProjectsI actually finished playing with Hexagons v3, haven't and ended up writing about it.
Check out my blog about the history of the project.What tinkering I'm doing now
The key thing that keeps my tinkering focus is this website, as I write this I'm actually refining the site to launch it. But that doesn't mean the work is finished on it. I still have so many little tweaks I want to make.
I'm also working on a presentation about accessibility which should hopefully be finished sooner rather than later.
What tinkering might happen?
Always wanted to make a cool web game, and I have a passion for unique UX that I would like to explore more.
Work
Read about the Professional.
What work I did
Got paid to build my first website all the way back in 2014, it was a super basic wordpress website that I built for my college.
After searching for a year and moving country I got a full time job working for Cruise.co.uk, a PHP/Jquery Site. It was my first experience of real development, and it lets me say I worked professionally with SVN.
After that I got to work for Connect in their JLR office. It was my first experience working to a strict scrum methodology. And I learned a great deal from the experience.
Left Day out of the kids after COVID-19 hit the business hard
Check out my CV for moreWhat work I'm doing
Right now I'm working for Purplebricks, only been here 3 months as I write this, but I'm feeling really good about my future here.
What I'm aiming for
Not really sure where the future will lead me, but at this moment what I have in the back of my head is to become a Frontend Architect.
One day I want to be helping create some of the most complex & beautiful website interfaces around.