About Me

Hello there.

I'm Stephen, and I am a software developer who has taken quite an unconventional path to get to where I am today. It has been quite the journey...

I originally studied music, but after realising that ultimately it wasn't for me as a career path, the search for a new passion began.

A lot of my family were (or have) worked in the transport industry, and I'm also very enthusiastic about driving, so I thought "Why not do that for a living?".

So for a while I became a bus driver.

Then after having drove the local buses for a couple of years I decided to take that to the next level and also become a tour guide. Driving into the Scottish Highlands talking non-sense about historical figures, monsters that don't exist (probably) and Scottish culture was an experience I certainly do not regret. However after a while I was starting to think about finding a more scalable career.

But then the global pandemic of 2020 struck.

After being left without work and unsure about my future, I had a lot of time to think about what I really wanted to do. Regardless of how difficult or lengthy the journey would be, as time was no obstacle.

I remembered back to when I was a kid. When I made the decision to pursue music, there was another option, the path not taken. I always liked the idea of being a programmer. I originally got my first experience with coding through Scratch at high school, and remembered finding it really intriguing. I unfortunately had fallen into the mindset back then that programming was only for very logical and mathematical individuals where as I wanted to pursue my creative hobbies.

So out of curiousity I boot up my PC one morning and find a beginners course on Python.

I was hooked.

It was from this moment on that I dedicated myself to studying programming every day. After a few months of self study I began my journey through CodeClan, Scotland's only coding bootcamp as of 2020.

As of October 2020, I am now a fully qualified software developer, all within just a year, A rollercoaster of a year.

React Synth.

React Synth is a web app synthesiser(synthesizer) using mainly React, Tone.js and the Web MIDI API.

For this project, I paired up with a like-minded developer to create a synth using React, it was an ambitious project considering the 1 week timeframe we had.

We were more than pleased with the result.

We developed this to use for our final project at CodeClan, however the project is far from over. The project also uses Express.js and MongoDB for data persistence.

Credit also goes to:
@jamesclarkson97

Dobble

Dobble (also known as Spot It!) is a popular family card game.

For this project, the aim was to make a browser adaption of the game as part of a small Agile team.

This is the result.

We undertook this project with a deadline of 1 week to use for our JavaScript group projects for our studies at CodeClan. As well as JavaScript the project also makes use of Vue, Express and MongoDB.

Credit also goes to:
@T-Nawrocki, @helenakolberg & @rud-y

The Engine Room

The Engine Room is a car showroom inventory CRUD app that would in theory be used by staff/management at a car showroom/dealership.

I undertook this project with a deadline of 1 week to use as my Ruby project for my studies at CodeClan. The tech stack consists of mainly Ruby, Sinatra and PostgreSQL.