My Story
A description of how I got where I am today.
Everything really started in 2005 when I got my first copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2. From here I started looking around for tutorials and signing up to a few graphic design forums. Before long I felt confident with Photoshop and wrote a couple of basic tutorials myself which, unfortunately, never got much of a look. From this inkling with Photoshop, and my now obsession with forums, I started fiddling with the idea of creating a webpage. This proved rather difficult as, not knowing any better, I started using the FrontPage design editor with Photoshop’s webpage generator.
In 2006 I took a Computer Studies course my school offered. In the first semester I followed along with the class, learning as much as I could and extending my knowledge outside of class. By the second semester I knew about writing web pages in notepad and had made a some basic pages. Our class assignment for this semester was to create a website, being one of the only students with any knowledge on the subject and a teacher who, to say the least, knew nothing on the subject, left me to teach the class. I endeavored to create a great webpage but knowing nothing about scripting and CSS was still being in it’s early stages. I found I became quickly annoyed by having to change the navigation area on multiple pages when I wanted to add or remove something thus leading me to creating dynamic pages using frames. A new world was opened up to me as soon as I started thinking about dynamic web design, before long I was on the JavaScript bandwagon.
2007 rolled around and I was getting quite into it. I was creating full websites to practice and pass time and managed to get my first hosted site for the Lightning Ridge Police Bush Safari. Not long after hosting it went live I got myself a host and started a personal site, which died off rather quickly. With my growing passion for design I took a programming course and with my basic knowledge of JavaScript and love for mathematics I caught on very easily. I learnt Python and Visual Basic both of which I created programs in well beyond the standard of my class. I entered the NCSS Python Challenge and placed 10th. In November I was selected as one of fourteen students to travel to Housten, Texas to attend a two week science and engineering competition run by NASA for which my team placed 1st.
2008 was a busy year for me. I traveled to Japan with other students from my Japanese class (from which I can still barely speak), competed in the NCSS Python Challenge again, placing 2nd this time and completed my HSC in physics and chemistry, a year ahead of my colleagues. I moved onto my second comercial website for the Forensic Services Police Bush Safari site which is now in its second revision. With this built myself a home server and started hosting from home.
My final year at school, 2009. I was accepted to attend the NCSS Summer School where I led a team of 15 to create a fully functional website including a hand written search engine. I designed my a website for a local shoe shop, Funky Feet. I had one last attempt at the NCSS Python Challenge where I finally placed 1st. After a long drought of employment I was offered two casual positions at Robos Computers and the Dubbo School of Distance Education, both of which I accepted. I completed my HSC and took a full time time position at Robos Computers.
It is now 2010, I am still working full time and have very little time for personal development (apologies for not creating a design for my own site, I will get there). I focus a lot more on my Python, C and PHP work these days.
